NFS mount failure strangles mailscanner

[Julian Field]

At 14:09 12/07/2002, you wrote:
>Julian,
>
>    I'm scratching my head over something very, very weird that happened
>last night...   First, my question: at the top of mailscanner.conf you
>have the comment:
>
># Note: If your directories are symlinked (soft-linked) in any way,
>#       please put their *real* location in here, not a path that
>#       includes any links. You may get some very strange error
>#       messages from some of the virus scanners if you don't.
>
>Which virus scanners?  What?  Why?  My setup of /opt/mailscanner does
>use symlinks, and I use the symlink paths in my conf file.  My
>/opt/mailscanner looks like thus:

It's mostly a problem with the incoming work dir and McAfee. McAfee prints
out the true path to infected files, not the path that was traversed to get
there. So if you traverse a softlink on your way to the directory in which
it expands all the MIME messages, then McAfee will report a different path
and will break the parser.


>lrwxrwxrwx   1 root     daemon        10 Jun 27 11:33 bin -> bin-3.21-1/
>drwxr-xr-x   2 root     none        1024 Jun 14 09:42 bin-3.20-6/
>drwxr-xr-x   2 root     none        1024 Jun 27 11:09 bin-3.21-1/
>lrwxrwxrwx   1 root     daemon        10 Jun 27 11:33 etc -> etc-3.21-1/
>drwxr-xr-x   2 root     none        1024 Jun 14 09:44 etc-3.20-6/
>drwxr-xr-x   2 root     none        1024 Jun 27 11:16 etc-3.21-1/
>drwxr-xr-x   3 root     none         512 May  2 11:52 man/
>drwxr-xr-x   5 jaearick jaearick     512 Jul  3 14:00 src/
>drwx------   4 root     none         512 May  3 09:38 var/

Doing bin and etc like this isn't a problem, it's what I do too.

>So I can easily switch between versions of mailscanner.  I use Sophos.
>Mailscanner has been working great, except...
>
>    For my weird problem...  Last night I rebooted my workstation at
>16:45 and headed home.  A startup process in /etc/rc3.d locked up, which
>happened to be before /etc/rc3.d/S15nfs.server.  My home directory from
>my workstation is NFS auto-mounted to a lot of other systems, including
>our mail server.  So, my home directory was unavailable to the mail server
>from late yesterday afternoon until this morning.
>
>    The last mailscanner syslog happened at exactly 17:00 yesterday afternoon,
>then nothing until midnight.  Check_mailscanner runs via cron at 10, 30, 50
>minutes after the hour, every hour.  At midnight, I have a cron job that shuts
>down mailscanner, rotates the syslogs, restarts mailscanner.  At that time,
>the startup blurb said there were 2728 messages waiting to be scanned.
>Mailscanner ran for about two minutes, then nothing.  The process was still
>there all night (I saw it via "ps"), just not doing anything.  After I got NFS
>service going on my workstation, and restarted mailscanner (4377 msgs
>waiting),
>things are fine again.
>
>    My homedir path is not in root, nor is it used anyplace in the mailscanner
>conf.  I'm still wondering if spamassassin may be using it, but the
>spamassassin
>config stuff all belongs to root and resides in local file systems on the
>mail server.  I'm stumped as to why lack of an NFS mount for my homedir
>on the mail server would lock up mailscanner like this...

SpamAssassin does use root's home directory, certainly. But I'm stumped for
ideas on this one at the moment, sorry. If it happens again, drop me
another note, as I'm trying to catch up on over 1000 emails from being away
for a week and so can't spend too long on each one, as otherwise I'll never
do anything else this weekend and it's nice and sunny outside!
--
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