MailScanner continously respawns without processing

[Lindsay Snider]

Hey Paul,
I apologize, I read your email wrong thinking that you didn't have any mail 
sitting in mqueue.in.  Given that, I might have a very similar problem of 
which I have not yet resolved.

We upgraded our mailservers running mailscanner 4.12-2 from 4.11-1.  In our 
conf, we have changed the locations of the spool directories.  We also run 
mailscanner as an unprivileged user.  

On just one of the servers, the upgrade did not go so well and the new 
mailscanner will not start.  We too get the <defunct> mailscanners.  I 
debugged the code down to a chdir command in Sendmail.pm line 740.  It seems 
to lock up w/ no error messages or graceful dieing.  The paths that it is 
trying to change to exist.  I can su - mailscanneruser and switch to the 
directories just fine so permissions seem fine.  I also wrote a mini setuid 
script which, dropped to our mailscanneruser and changed to the directory 
line 740 was having problems with, and that worked as well.  If we run 
mailscanner as root, it works fine.  If your problem is similar, maybe try 
running as root just to see?  I'm thinking we might have a buggy setuid 
perl....?

More info:
The servers that did work were RH8.0 whereas the server that did not was 7.3
RH7.3 box has perl 5.6.1
RH8.0 boxes have perl 5.8.0

Curious to what you find,
Lindsay

On Friday 14 February 2003 12:06, you wrote:
> 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