Monitoring Mail Services


A key part of any healthy service is monitoring. This includes watching the log files for anomalies, verifying that you have sufficient disk space, and monitoring the function of your mail service daemons.

Watching mail logs

As you already know, your full mail service is comprised of numerous processes. Postfix accepts incoming mail, Cyrus manages connections from mail clients, and AMaViS scans the contents of your messages for viruses and junk mail. Each of these services has a log file. Some have multiple log files with a separate file storing information about a specific function. Each of these logs is available in the Server Admin tool.

To access mail logs

1.

From the Computers & Services column, select Mail.

2.

Select the Logs tab at the bottom of the screen.

3.

Select the log you wish to view from the drop-down menu (Figure 8.52).

Figure 8.52. The Server Admin tool shows you full log details for each of the mail processes.


4.

If you wish to adjust the verbosity of the logs, select the Settings tab and then select the Logging tab. Use the drop-down menus to change the desired information (Figure 8.53).

Figure 8.53. You can easily adjust the detail of the log files using Server Admin.


Tip

  • The Debug setting provides the most detail, while the Critical setting only shows critical errors. For normal, day-to-day monitoring, you should probably use Notice or Warning levels so your log files only show things you need to see. However, if you're diagnosing a specific problem, it may be helpful to adjust these to their Debug setting.


Monitoring disk space

For mail to be received, there must be available disk space on the server to save it, so it's important to regularly monitor your disk utilization.

To view available disk space

1.

From the Computers & Services column, select the name of your server.

2.

Select the System tab at the bottom of the screen.

Disk space summaries are shown in the bottom portion of the window (Figure 8.54).

Figure 8.54. Disk usage is shown in the System tab of Server Admin.


3.

If you'd like to know how much disk space is used just by your mail service, select Mail from the Computers & Services column.

4.

Select the Maintenance tab at the bottom of the screen and then select the Database tab.

Figure 8.55 shows the amount of space your mail service is utilizing.

Figure 8.55. Server Admin will show you the amount of space the Mail service is using along with the locations of its files.


Tip

  • As shown in Figure 8.56, you can also view your disk utilization from the command line by typing

    Figure 8.56. Disk usage is also available on the command line using df.

    df -hl 

    The -h option tells df to show the numbers in a human-readable format (30 G for 30 gigabytes), while the -l option tells df to restrict its output to local volumes only.


Quota monitoring

It's also important to monitor the disk consumption of individual users. Some users may find it convenient to just keep all of their mail rather than deleting any of it or keeping it stored on their local computer. Although this might be easier for them, it wouldn't be fair to the other users if someone's mail wasn't accepted due to lack of disk space while someone else had a huge mailbox. This is why establishing quotas is important.

To see individual quota utilization

1.

From the Computers & Services column, select Mail.

2.

Select the Maintenance tab at the bottom of the screen and then select the Accounts tab.

3.

Click either the Quota Used or %Free column to sort the output (Figure 8.57).

Figure 8.57. Server Admin provides a convenient interface to monitor the disk usage for each mailbox. Clicking on a column header will sort by that column.


You can click the column again to reverse the listing.




Mac OS X Server 10. 4 Tiger. Visual QuickPro Guide
Mac OS X Server 10.4 Tiger: Visual QuickPro Guide
ISBN: 0321362446
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2006
Pages: 139
Authors: Schoun Regan

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