Exim on CentOS 4

I recently bought a new machine from Layeredtech for my commercial mail anti spam system and am having endless troubles with it. I have a similar machine at Hetzner also running CentOS 5 and it too is having problems, though less frequently.

The short of it is that the drives disconnect, file systems go read only and the box needs a reboot:

ata1.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x0 action 0x2 frozen
ata1.00: (BMDMA stat 0x4)
ata1.00: tag 0 cmd 0xca Emask 0x4 stat 0x40 err 0x0 (timeout)
ata1: soft resetting port
ata1: SATA link up 1.5 Gbps (SStatus 113 SControl 310)
ata1.00: qc timeout (cmd 0xec)
ata1.00: failed to IDENTIFY (I/O error, err_mask=0x4)
ata1.00: revalidation failed (errno=-5)


sd 0:0:0:0: SCSI error: return code = 0x00040000
end_request: I/O error, dev sda, sector 226813249
Buffer I/O error on device sda3, logical block 27835568
lost page write due to I/O error on sda3
sd 0:0:0:0: SCSI error: return code = 0x00040000
end_request: I/O error, dev sda, sector 227360961
Buffer I/O error on device sda3, logical block 27904032
lost page write due to I/O error on sda3

So in an effort to figure out if this is a CentOS 5 problem - both ISPs certify CentOS 4 on their hardware - I needed to get my application going on CentOS 4. This turned out to be quite a mission involving getting Exim with MySQL and the recently integrate exiscan rather than the patched version.

I looked at the various options and decided to just backport CentOS 5's Exim package to CentOS 4.

As it turns out I haven't yet had a machine re-installed with CentOS 4 as I found some posts suggesting some kernel parameters that might fix things, I've applied these now to the machines and wait.

My Exim RPMs can be found below:

exim-4.63-3.src.rpm
exim-4.63-3.i386.rpm
exim-mon-4.63-3.i386.rpm
exim-sa-4.63-3.i386.rpm

As with the CentOS 5 ones you'll need various DB client libraries installed as this supports speaking to Postgres, MySQL, SQLite etc.

This should be useful to anyone who just wants a more recent version of Exim on their CentOS/RedHat 4 machines.