MailScanner doesn't deal with lousy internet

[Gerry Doris]

On Mon, 25 Aug 2003, Chris Mason wrote:

> One of my servers is on a DSL from Cable & Wireless and they are having
> problems with the gateway. We are seeing periods of packet loss and
> outages as they try to fix it, and it's been going on for a couple of
> days now.
> The server is running Redhat 7.3 and MailScanner with SA and
> ClamAV/F-Prot. I found today that mail had not been delivered for hours
> so I checked the server and found that the scripts that updated the
> virus databases had locked up. Restarting MailScanner did not fix it and
> only killing the offending PIDs solved it.
> Is there a way to improve this situation? I would like to lower the
> update schedule to nightly so as to lessen the chance of this happening.
> Is there a way to kill off any update scripts with the old MailScanner
> process?
>
> Chris Mason

This is a problem with the scripts that are used for updating the virus
scanner data files.  They place a lock on MailScanner until they finish.
If they hang then mail will continue to be received but will not be
delivered.

I added a timer to my f-port-autoupdate and clamav-autoupdate to fix
this.  I passed my changes on to Julian but I forget if he used them or
not?

--
Gerry

"The lyfe so short, the craft so long to learne"  Chaucer