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.
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|
2.
|
Select the Logs tab at the bottom of the screen.
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|
3.
|
Select the log you wish to view from the drop-down menu (
Figure 8.52
).
|
|
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
).
|
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
).
|
|
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
.
|
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Tip
-
As shown in
Figure 8.56
, you can also view your disk utilization from the command line by typing
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
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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
).
You can click the column again to reverse the listing.
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|
