orphaned mqueue.in/df* files

[Julian Field]

I have spent ages looking for this one, and with the help of 20,000
messages I have finally managed to re-create it. This is fixed in the next
release.

What you saw as an orphaned file was in fact processed and sitting in the
outgoing queue. It never turned up in your maillog because sendmail was not
told to deliver it immediately (though it would have been picked up by the
next regular queue run by sendmail). You just managed to kill MailScanner
in the middle of the "delete a message from the incoming queue directory"
function. I have just improved this so as to make it perfectly safe to kill
it partway through, guaranteeing that it will be completed before the
process dies.

The only exception to this is if you "kill -9" the processes, which I of
course cannot stop. But if you go around always doing a "kill -9" on
processes, you deserve all the mess you will get and it stops the processes
being able to clear up properly.


At 20:46 30/12/2002, you wrote:
>We have MailScanner with SA and razor running successfully on several
>RH7.3 machines.  These machines are fairly heavily load.  We
>experience a strange problem though when we stop and then start
>MailScanner:
>
>we have df files in the mqueue.in directory that have no corresponding
>qf files and a grep of the maillogs for the file names (less the df
>part of course) indicates that these files were never processed. and
>without a qf part will never get processed...
>
>We've tried running 'sendmail -oQ/var/spool/mqueue.in -q -v' with
>MailScanner stopped but only the df+qf pairs were processed.  The df
>without qf files don't know where to go since they have no qf part.
>
>The times on these df files in question correspond directly with the
>times the MailScanner service was stopped and restarted.   We did not
>see this problem until we put the servers in service under heavy
>load.
>
>Any help would be appreciated!
>--
>Thanks!
>--
>Clint Miller

--
Julian Field
www.MailScanner.info
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