red hat 8 weirdness

[Julian Field]

At 20:08 19/11/2002, you wrote:
> > At 19:42 19/11/2002, you wrote:
> > >Just a couple problems I am having here with Red Hat 8.0 and MailScanner
> > >4.05-3:
> > >
> > >Mailscanner is restarting itself every 10 seconds, regardless of what I
>have
> > >set in the /etc/MailScanner.conf.
> >
> > What does the maillog say?
>
>Hi Julian,
>
>Great program btw, I use it on a handful of linux servers and got my
>colleague in Toronto to use it on his Cobalt RaQ.  We both love it.

Glad you like it! Have you added a comment in the "guest book" on the
website yet?

>Here's  my maillog:
>
>--- snip ---
>Nov 19 14:39:13 worm sendmail[1400]: alias database /etc/aliases rebuilt by
>mbest
>Nov 19 14:39:13 worm sendmail[1400]: /etc/aliases: 64 aliases, longest 10
>bytes, 636 bytes total
>Nov 19 14:39:13 worm sendmail[1409]: starting daemon (8.12.5): SMTP
>Nov 19 14:39:13 worm sendmail[1414]: starting daemon (8.12.5):
>queueing at 00:15:00
>Nov 19 14:39:14 worm MailScanner[1426]: MailScanner
>Nov 19 14:39:14 worm MailScanner[1426]: MailScanner E-Mail Virus Scanner
>version 4.05-3 starting...
>Nov 19 14:39:14 worm MailScanner[1426]: Using locktype = flock
>Nov 19 14:39:24 worm MailScanner[1428]: MailScanner
>Nov 19 14:39:24 worm MailScanner[1428]: MailScanner E-Mail Virus Scanner
>version 4.05-3 starting...
>Nov 19 14:39:24 worm MailScanner[1428]: Using locktype = flock
>Nov 19 14:39:34 worm MailScanner[1430]: MailScanner
>Nov 19 14:39:34 worm MailScanner[1430]: MailScanner E-Mail Virus Scanner
>version 4.05-3 starting...
>Nov 19 14:39:34 worm MailScanner[1430]: Using locktype = flock
>--- snip ---

That's normal.
It will start up the parent plus as many child processes as you've got
configured in
         Max Children
in MailScanner.conf. By default this is 5. There is a 10 second skew
between starting up each MailScanner in order to avoid the "herd of
elephants" problem that can plague parallel-processing systems.

--
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