OSI/MHS Configuration and Management Manual

OSI/MHS Configuration and Management Manual—424827-003
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9
Troubleshooting Your OSI/MHS
Subsystem
This section describes troubleshooting for the OSI/MHS subsystem. Specifically, it
covers the following topics:
•
Troubleshooting strategy and philosophy
•
Interconnection problems with other MTAs
•
Unroutable messages and nondelivery reports
•
Message tracking
•
Interconnection problems with gateways
•
LO and RS process interface problems
Troubleshooting Strategy and Philosophy
Problems in a message handling system can present themselves in several different
ways. For example, certain EMS events or groups of events can signify a problem; so
can increases in statistics counters (such as counts of route and link retries). Finally, a
problem can surface as a complaint from a user; for example, the user sends a
message, receives no response, and calls the network administrator to report a service
problem.
In general, the sooner a problem is recognized, the sooner it can be solved. Therefore
it is valuable to monitor both the EMS events and the critical counters, such as those of
the RTS (and RS if configured), and the ROUTERETRY and LINKRETRY queues
during normal operations. When a problem arises, a review of recent events and
current statistics is often enough to pinpoint the problem. If not, you can use SCF to
trace process activities and interactions, and PTrace to display the trace data in
readable form.
The SCF commands and MHS tracing are described in the OAI/MHS SCF Reference
Manual and in Section 2, Management Environment for OSI/MHS. The events that
OSI/MHS reports are described in the OSI/MHS Management Programming Manual
and the Operator Messages Manual.
Interconnection Problems With Other MTAs
Interconnection problems typically occur as a result of a configuration error. Very
rarely they are caused by something else, such as a software defect. All configuration
errors must be eliminated before another type of error can be presumed.