Technical issues on Linux

[Derek Atkins]

> 1)  The TCP connect() system call apparently never times out in current
>   versions of Linux.  This caused mail server crashes here during the AOL
>   outage Tuesday (hundreds of sendmail processes building up, waiting
>   indefinitely for the AOL server to come back up).

Actually, this isn't completely true.  It *will* timeout.  It just
requires a VERY long time (like 15 minutes, I think).  I don't know if
this was fixed in 2.0 or not.

-derek