SYSERR(root): readqf: cannot open ./df*

[Julian Field]

Couple of points.
1) MailScanner does indeed invoke background copies of sendmail, which why
you *sometimes* are seeing 2nd sendmail processes with a PPID=1.
2) Make sure you aren't running out of file locks. What are your settings
for the maximum message batch size? This might explain it only happening at
high load (==>big batches). If you start bash and then do a "ulimit -a" you
should get something around 4000. If you aren't then add a "ulimit -n 4000"
to the init.d script that starts MailScanner. Linux itself dynamically
creates more file locks as they are needed (I had a good dig through the
kernel source), but bash will impose a resource limit (ulimit) of its own
on its shells and sub-processes.

At 18:23 12/12/2002, you wrote:
>On Thu, 2002-12-12 at 10:20, Spicer, Kevin wrote:
> >
> > I didn't really post my configuration here it is...
> > Mandrake 9.0 (kernel 2.4.19)
> > sendmail 8.12.6
> > mailscanner 3.23
> >
> > The other oddness is that I noticed a few minutes ago that there are
> > occaisionally more than two sendmail processes running (not including
> > children - i.e. processess with a PPID of 1) I suspect this might be
> > part of the problem - but I don't know where they are coming from!
> > Does anyone know if mailscanner invokes sendmail directly?
> >
>Okay, that's probably your problem. As I recall it's the master sendmail
>process, the one that is listening for SMTP connections that locks the
>access.db, so a second master process is going to create a problem.
>
>How often are you restarting MailScanner? What might be happening, if
>you are using a mailscanner init script that also starts sendmail, is
>that a restart of mailscanner isn't successfully killing the existing
>sendmail and starting up a new sendmail so that two are running. That's
>one of the reasons that I always set up a MailScanner system with one
>init script for sendmail and another for MailScanner. Another reason is
>that a change in the sendmail config (that requires a restart) hardly
>ever requires a MailScanner restart. And since MailScanner does need to
>be periodically restarted, that doesn't mean that sendmail need to be
>kicked at the same time.
>
>It's probably not a big deal on a low volume server, but on busy ones
>you really don't want to be restarting thing any more often than is
>absolutely, positively, required.
>--
>=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=
>The instructions said to use Windows 98 or better, so I installed RedHat
>    Jim Levie                                 email:
>jim at entrophy-free.net

--
Julian Field
www.MailScanner.info
MailScanner thanks transtec Computers for their support