MailScanner sudden failure!

[Julian Field]

At 18:57 12/07/2002, you wrote:
>I came into work this morning and found that my Redhat 7.3 Server
>(Sendmail 11.6) running stock Mailscanner 3.20-7 (from RPM) stopped working.
>  Sendmail accepts mail and places it in the /var/spool/queue.in as normal
>but mailscanner stopped processing them.  This setup was working fine for
>almost 1 month.
>
>The process list show mailscanner as follows:
>(1st)
>root 8754 0.1 3.5 19600 17992 ? S 10:33 0:02 /usr/bin/perl
>/usr/local/MailScanner/bin/mailscanner
>/usr/local/MailScanner/etc/mailscanner.conf
>
>(2nd)
>root 11544 4.4 0.0  0  0 ? Z 10:55   0:00 [mailscanner <defunct>]

What did you syslog/maillog say?
Are you using the "osirusoft" DNSBL (in a "Spam List" configuration line)?
There seem to be distinct problems with osirusoft today, and it may be
making things run slowly.

The next feature I am going to add is a "Ignore Spam List entry after n
timeouts" feature, so that the failure of one of the RBL's doesn't cause
MailScanner to run slowly for very long. It will restore it to the list
when it next restarts itself, but until then it won't try to use it.
--
Julian Field                Teaching Systems Manager
jkf at ecs.soton.ac.uk         Dept. of Electronics & Computer Science
Tel. 023 8059 2817          University of Southampton
                             Southampton SO17 1BJ