File unlinking problem

[Desai, Jason]

Was one of the options that you changed the Run As User / Group?  Perhaps
the file in the queue was owned by another user?  Do you still have the
file, so you can check it?

Jase

-----Original Message-----
From: Ray Gardener [mailto:r.a.gardener at SHU.AC.UK]
Sent: Friday, February 22, 2002 11:39 AM
To: MAILSCANNER at JISCMAIL.AC.UK
Subject: [MAILSCANNER] File unlinking problem


I had a unusual problem today - unfortunately I am only able to give a
description rather that a full log on the instance because the symptoms
aren't logged in syslog. (I am logging mail.debug level  BTW)

Briefly Mailscanner died and wouldn't restart even after several attempts to
run check_mailscanner. I will try to paraphase the message it reported but I
didn't record it as I was rather flustered at the time.

It couldn't resolve an unknown dependency concerning -t option at line 420
of sendmail.pl;

that line reads

unlink "$OutQueue/$file";

and concerns "Removing Duplicates from the outgoing queue:\n";

after inspecting I decided to look at the outgoing queue; there was a file
present which co-incided with the time mailscanner stopped. I moved this to
another place and restarted mailscanner with check_mailscanner and
mailscanner started to work again.

1) I think that the time it stop coincided with me killing mailscanner with
kill -9 in order to then restart it with different options. Clearly the
queue was confused by a duplicate file existing in the outgoing and incoming
queues but also clearly the code tries to cater for this situation and in my
case failed. Anyone help me with this might have been?

2) My other point relates to that fact that this error doesn't seem seem to
be logged in syslog even though a diagnostic appeared on my console. Should
I expect this to be logged somewhere?

3) is killing with kill -9 advisable?

4) Finally my queues once restart processed 3.5 thousand messages in a 1.30
hours. I suspect that this could have been faster if I adjusted the number
of messages that could be process in a batch from 100 to some number. Is
there a sane upper limit for this?

Technical details

system: Sunblade 1000
OS: Solaris 8
MTA: Exim 3.35
Version of mailscanner: 3.11-1
deliver in background set to yes
delivery type is queue

Regards

Ray Gardener
Sheffield hallam University
CIS
0114 224 4926


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