Sendmail service in maintenance mode with "Reason: Method failed repeatedly."

Hi,

The abnormal termination of sendmail process will bring the service in maintenance mode. I use command "pkill sendmail" for killing all sendmail process as there were thousands of junk mails were pending in a queue. Due to this there was a poor performance on apps 11i web application Sever.

After killing sendmail with pkill and disabled sendmail service with svcadm command, after this cpu and memory holds by this processes were release and Server performance resumed to normal.

After clearing the mail queue tried to enable sendmail but failed. It was still in maintenace mode.


bash-3.00# svcs -p smtp
STATE STIME FMRI
maintenance Oct_12 svc:/network/smtp:sendmail


To find the impact on service:


bash-3.00# svcs -x
vc:/network/smtp:sendmail (sendmail SMTP mail transfer agent)
State: maintenance since Tue Oct 12 10:23:18 2010
Reason: Method failed repeatedly.
See: http://sun.com/msg/SMF-8000-8Q
See: sendmail(1M)
See: /var/svc/log/network-smtp:sendmail.log
Impact: This service is not running.


Cleared errors on service smtp:


bash-3.00# svcadm clear smtp


started service smtp:


bash-3.00# svcs -p smtp
STATE STIME FMRI
online 8:15:58 svc:/network/smtp:sendmail
8:15:58 23249 sendmail
8:15:58 23250 sendmail
8:15:58 23251 sendmail
8:15:58 23252 sendmail
bash-3.00# svcs sendmail
STATE STIME FMRI
online 8:15:58 svc:/network/smtp:sendmail


Now the sendmail service is online.