MailScanner continously respawns without processing

[Jeremy Evans]

That is normal behavior I believe.  It's MailScanner setting up the number
of child processes specified in MailScanner.conf.  If you get more than the
number of child processes (plus one for the parent process), then something
might be wrong.

Also, I've noticed that if check_mailscanner is not setup properly, running
it again will add another parent process, so you might want to check that.

Jeremy Evans
Information Systems Analyst
California State Auditor
916-445-0255 phone
916-322-7801 fax


-----Original Message-----
From: Paul Hansen [mailto:phvt at EMAIL.COM]
Sent: Friday, February 14, 2003 9:06 AM
To: MAILSCANNER at JISCMAIL.AC.UK
Subject: MailScanner continously respawns without processing


Hi all--

I have a new installation of MailScanner 4.12-2, Exim 4.12, Kaspersky
and SpamAssassin. At this point I am just trying to troubleshoot
MailScanner itself (from queue to queue) since Exim does accept a new
message and drop it in the incoming queue.

I installed MailScanner using the tar distribution. I manually installed
all of the required Perl modules with the recommended versions and
patches.

My main problem is I've been unable to get any troubleshooting logs out
of MailScanner itself. I get almost nothing in syslog (syslogd -r -m 0)
and when run in with Debug I get the same log entries as otherwise:

Feb 14 11:01:12 granite MailScanner[20449]: MailScanner
Feb 14 11:01:12 granite MailScanner[20449]: MailScanner E-Mail Virus
Scanner version 4.12-2 starting...
Feb 14 11:01:22 granite MailScanner[20507]: MailScanner
Feb 14 11:01:22 granite MailScanner[20507]: MailScanner E-Mail Virus
Scanner version 4.12-2 starting...
Feb 14 11:18:40 granite MailScanner[27699]: MailScanner
Feb 14 11:18:40 granite MailScanner[27699]: MailScanner E-Mail Virus
Scanner version 4.12-2 starting...
Feb 14 11:18:50 granite MailScanner[27748]: MailScanner
Feb 14 11:18:50 granite MailScanner[27748]: MailScanner E-Mail Virus
Scanner version 4.12-2 starting...
Feb 14 11:19:00 granite MailScanner[27827]: MailScanner
Feb 14 11:19:00 granite MailScanner[27827]: MailScanner E-Mail Virus
Scanner version 4.12-2 starting...



It appears MailScanner is repeatedly trying to initialize itself but
never succeeds. This continues until I kill the MailScanner process. I
never have more than one MailScanner process running (there's usually a
<defunct> one lurking too).

MailScanner does change to the exim UID/GID and I've made sure
/opt/MailScanner/var is writable by that UID--the only time I caught an
error message in syslog was when it wasn't.

I am using Red Hat Linux 7.2.

Is it possible to turn on more verbose logging? I just have so little to
troubleshoot with.

Any suggestions? Thank you!

Paul