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Matt Hanson
Asked: 2009-07-14 06:53:31 +0800 CST

Symantec Mail Security MTA Compontents Fail

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We're using Symantec Mail Security for SMTP. Every so often (perhaps every few weeks) we start getting an email alert like the following:

 Symantec Mail Security Alert Notification for xxxx

 ALERT NOTIFICATION

 The following system components are not responding/working:

 Host                     Component                Problem
 Local Host               MTA (Inbound)            Stopped
                          MTA (Outbound)           Stopped
                          MTA (Delivery)           Stopped

We continue to get the same alert every hour, on the hour. Mail delivery does not seem to be affected. Restarting the server fixes the issue and messages stop, at least for a few weeks anyways. There has to be a better solution to this than the restart "solution". Better yet, why is this happening?

symantec

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    From the syntax of the error message, it sounds like you're using the Symantec Mail Security for SMTP appliance. We haven't seen these messages before, but it sounds to me like you need to start going through the logs for the appliance.

    alt text
    (source: sysadmin1138.net)

    Change your type to 'Control Center Logs'. The messages with information that will help diagnose this problem are most likely in the logs with the word "Brightmail" in them. It could be that there is a transient fault that's causing the appliance to restart the MTA queues which is why mail delivery is seemingly unaffected.

    I do know that I've had issues similar to this in severity that were resolved in the next code refresh from Symantec, which seems to come out monthly. For instance, a kind of 'filter hub crash' messages was common for a few weeks and went away when we updated the software next.

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