AIX freezing???

[Julian Field]

At 20:11 09/05/2002, you wrote:
>   Mailscanner experts,
>
>We are running 2.6 of Mailscanner on AIX4.3.3 systems with Sophos.   About
>every week or two one of our AIX systems will simply freeze up on us.  We
>really don't know why.  We can't seem to identify anything through any of
>the running logs.  We have noticed prior to the freezing up that we
>occassionally notice a virus that has been rejected minutes before the
>freeze up.  Basically, access to all commands (perhaps the hard drive or
>filesystems) becomes unaccessible and then eventually (perhaps a few
>minutes) the background processes die out and the whole system is
>frozen.  The only thing to do is to reboot.  I can't say that Mailscanner
>necessarily has anything to do with this, but was wondering if anyone else
>has had this experience?  Its one of our top two processes on this system
>from what we can tell.  Is there a logging facility for Mailscanner that we
>might enable?  Can Mailscanner possibly result in some sort of DoS
>preventing access to filesystems?  Any thoughts are much appreciated!

Check your maillog for any reports of denial of service attacks (though
MailScanner happily copes with them).

Also, try reducing the "Restart Every" time in mailscanner.conf to a few
hours. That will protect you against any Perl resource leaks.
--
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