Virus scanner lock file not removed

[David Osborne]

Julian -- thanks for the explanation. Yesterday, a batch of messages was
only processed by MailScanner when I deleted the lock file. I've just
rebooted the machine and a test message went straight through.

David

On Fri, 2003-04-04 at 16:25, Julian Field wrote:
> The file is created but it never needs to be deleted. When the autoupdate
> script does its job, it locks the file with an exclusive lock, does the
> update, then unlocks it again.
>
> MailScanner processes always lock the file with a "shared" lock when they
> want to use the scanner. Lots of "shared" locks can be used on a file at
> the same time (in this case, one per MailScanner child process), but only 1
> "exclusive" lock can be held at a time, and that stops any "shared" locks
> as well (which is what the autoupdate script uses).
>
> So it's not the presence of the file that is stopping MailScanner running,
> it's something else.
>
> I use Sophos myself and have never had a problem of this sort, so I'm not
> quite sure what is going wrong...

--
David Osborne <david.osborne at nottingham.ac.uk>
Information Services, University of Nottingham