This is a story of how a log file that got too large degraded a production system for a couple days. It illustrates what happens if you dive into a problem without stepping back and asking basic questions.

We use Redmine as an issue tracking/project management platform. It has the capability to ingest emails from standard input. Late last week, we realized that this feature had stopped working. What followed was a lot of time in the weeds which could have been avoided if I’d just stopped to work the problem.

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