NFS mount failure strangles mailscanner

[Jeff A. Earickson]

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:

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/

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...

** Jeff A. Earickson, Ph.D                         PHONE: 207-872-3659
** Senior UNIX Sysadmin, Information Technology    EMAIL: jaearick at colby.edu
** Colby College, 4214 Mayflower Hill,               FAX: 207-872-3076
** Waterville ME, 04901-8842
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