MailScanner hanging

[Paul Hamilton]

We to have experienced this situation on several occasions over the last two
months, it always seems to happen mid afternoon UK time, when our server is
working hardest.
This afternoon we had a problem with the Kaspersky updater hanging half way
through
updating the critical files.
By killing all the "autoupdate" processes except the main "global updater"
and running
the updater from the command line we determined that the autoupdate ran a
couple of times
then timed out and seemed to stick. We exited by hitting Ctrl-C and tried
again this time
it worked fine. In this case we think the Kaspersky site was being
unreliable.

On other occasions we have quarantined the contents of the mqueue.in,
stopped MailScanner,
restarted and mail flowed again. We then systematically transferred the
quarantined mqueue.in until it all delivered or we found an offending mail
that just would not go. We're not sure whether this was overly scientific
but it worked in a couple of cases.

It would be great if the list could share there experiences on this one as,
above all else
mail not flowing is the single contributor to our pacemaker servicing
bills.........
(heart stimulants at the ready!!)

If a list of potential suspects could be generated so we could create a
check list I'm
sure we would all sleep better.

Good idea or not all comments welcome.

Paul H.


Hello,
Just today I began having a problem with mailscanner which has been running
untouched since I upgraded to 4.22-5 in July.

Mandrake Linux 9.1
Postfix
MailScanner 4.22-5
Command Antivirus

For some reason MailScanner seems to be hanging on a batch of messages.  I
see
log entries that say it has started a new batch of 34 messages, but it never
follows with a "message clean" notice or a delivery entry.  It just sits
there and the messages are piling up.  There is no error or info messages
being logged either.  It seems there may be a message that it is chocking
on,
but I don't know how to tell what is going on.

Has anyone seen this before?  What can I do to trouble shot this thing.  Any
suggestions would be welcome.  Thanks

--
Regards

Joseph Watson