Knowledge base

Crash dump

core dump
The reason a debugger is set up in advance

An image of the engine’s memory saved at the moment of the crash.

Where it lives. In the /opt/pmta/ directory on Linux; for Windows the manual gives no path.

The main trap is forgetting that the file exists. It is not edited every day and so drops out of sight: when setting permissions, when making backups, when investigating. Yet it defines the node’s state on a par with the main file.
What the Hub does. The Hub does not collect dumps. The directory with them is part of the node’s state — what the manual tells you to copy for recovery.
Recommended values

What to check:

What What it should be
location what the manual names
permissions the same as the rest of the configuration
backup together with the configuration directory

Copy it together with the node’s other files — on its own it is rarely remembered.

The order of checks is ours. From the manual come the file’s location and its purpose.
Example configuration
# check whether the file exists and with what permissions
ls -l /etc/pmta/
Listing the configuration directory answers both questions at once — whether the file exists and whether it is protected the same way as the others.
yellow — — directive names, blue — blocks. They are highlighted the same way in the text of the card.
Compatibility
PowerMTA 6.0
described in the manual of this version · platform: any
The vendor does not state the first version for every directive — there is no note here. The name also appears in the 5.0 edition of the manual.
Reference data
Syntax
Binary memory image, compressed where the system can.
Everything here comes from the manual, with the section.
How to check on the node
Check it together with the other configuration files:
ls -l /etc/pmta/
pmta test config
The first shows presence and permissions. The second — that the configuration as a whole parses: if the file is damaged, it shows up right here.
In the Hub
Cost of a mistake
safe: a wrong value breaks nothing