I had to restart the mailserver this morning. No mail should be lost but there could be a few hours delay while things catch up.

There have been further problems with both the MySQL server and Exim.
The immediate problems have been fixed but investigation into the cause continues. I will report as soon as I have the full facts.

The cause of yesterdays problem were from a very heavy spam attack on on domain. This was to the extent of using 50% of the total system resources bringing down the mail server on a number of occasions and producing enormous system logs. The processes causing this have now been disabled and the system is running stably.

The problems were not helped by one of my computers acting up with disk faults. This machine is not booting properly this morning and it looks like one disk may be dead. It is the second disk on this system I can boot it without the second hard disk. Idiot Windows of course wants to go in and reconfigure everything which would not be a good idea at this juncture.

It would not be too serious except that this is my primary mailserver so I may have limited mail access for a period.