I am trying to download e-mails, and I keep getting the message that the server was interrupted. It says that the server says:

/lib/i686/libc.so.6(__fortify_fail+0x50)[0xb7683960]

This is a server side problem I believe. How do I fix this? This is going on with 2 of my mailboxes.

While I believe the message should contain more than just that single line this seems to be about Glibc stack smashing protection. Ask the developers of the mail server software how you should present your debug information.

It didn't do this when I first configured the mail server. Now it's doing it, but only to 2 of my mailboxes. What do I reinstall or whatever to fix this? I'm using Mandriva Linux 2010.1, so that you can find the package names of what to properly re-install.

I don't think it is the place of anyone here to find what package names to reinstall on your system, aren't you the sysadmin? And reinstalling is not likely to fix this problem anyway.

That said, I think what unSpawn was telling you is that you should find out what mail server software is actually running on your system, then contact the development team for that software and ask them what that message means.

If it was not doing it previously but is doing it now, then I suspect that something has changed. Have you upgraded any packages on those machines recently?

I don't remember what all changes I made. I was still in the process of installing the server. I'd just gotten that service working, and was testing it out, when it happened.

I did complete the server though, so if I really had to, I could start from scratch again on the whole server. That should fix the problem, since it wasn't doing that before. Do you think that is the easiest way to do things, rather than troubleshooting for now?

postfix is my mail transfer agent, and vm-pop3d is the pop3 server. I forgot what is the smtp server name.

I'll try reinstalling glibc, to see if that fixes the problem, or it could be something with the actual mailboxes.

P.S. - I know re-installing the whole thing would fix whatever is causing this: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...re-4175481683/

It sounds like maybe you got some packages that weren't for your distro, or maybe from a third party source, that might be causing multiple problems.

In general, reinstalling is rarely preferable to troubleshooting, but most troubleshooting methods must presume that the underlying system is a known quantity.

If you are unsure where your pacakges came from, if any of those sources were not "official" repos, or if you have other reason to think there might be a package problem then maybe a reinstall would at least re-establish that known good condition - then go from there.

You mentioned glibc - do you have a reason to suspect it?

Well, it appears glibc is some kind of system package or something, because it won't let me install or re-install it. I had the reason to, that since I'd posted this, besides the post, I'd checked to see what package the library was in, and it said it was in glibc. I believe that they were official repositories at the time I'd downloaded the packages. I forgot which one though. I downloaded the packages, and installed them on an NAS, and I install them from there.

Yes, glibc is the GNU C library and pretty much everything including the kernel depends on it, so a corrupted or incorrect glibc package will usually trash a system.

I was a longtime Mandrake/Mandriva user, but have not used it since about 2006 and don't know anything about it's status with the new owners, but wish them well - excellent distro in the past. So I don't really know what to tell you to do from this point.

Reinstalling always seems a Windows thing to do, but if you are having multiple problems and suspect your underlying system it might be a good option.

If you have a good NAS then you should have no problem backing up and restoring user data at least.

So it's something about the mailboxes, because when I created new mailboxes, it worked fine. Here are the mailboxes.

So I created new mailboxes, and it doesn't complain of errors. Then I filled it with the old content, to see what would happen, and I downloaded the new messages. It doesn't complain of errors anymore, but now it ignores all the messages.

So I think obviously there is something "bad" in the content and it is probably not a software problem at all.

I encountered a problem several years ago that caused a mailbox to choke. Never figured out what it actually was, but flushing out the box solved it and it never recurred.

I put some mail in some blank mailboxes, which I just created with touch. Hopefully this will work. I'll try it for awhile and see.