MailScanner continously respawns without processing

[Paul Hansen]

Hi all--

Thanks for the replies. I forgot to mention in my original message that
I'm using Perl 5.6.1.

Here's where I am so far.

Nerijus Baliunas wrote:
> I had the same problem. Change code status to beta.

I had tried even alpha previously, but this didn't help.

Julian Field wrote:
> *If* it is continuously respawning then check that the mail UID+GID
can
> write to the MailScanner/incoming and MailScanner/quarantine
directories,
> as well as the incoming and outgoing queue directories and the PID
file.
> That is normally the cause of this.
>
> If it is just starting up, expect it to produce a parent + 5 child
> processes by default, you just need to try putting some mail in the
> incoming queue. If you are using Exim 4, then the incoming and
outgoing
> queue dirs set in MailScanner need to be the "input" directories of
each
> Exim queue directory structure.

Before posting I checked all the dirs that MailScanner needs and they
were correct. I'd already caught myself making both of the above
mistakes ;)

Julian Field wrote:
> >I have narrowed the problem down to MailScanner dying silently during
> >MailScanner::SA::initialise().

> Did you happen to work out exactly where in SA::initialise it failed,
> and/or why?

I now have this code in MailScanner::SA::initialise():

MailScanner::Log::InfoLog("SA: SAspamtest->compile_now()...");
$MailScanner::SA::SAspamtest->compile_now();
MailScanner::Log::InfoLog("SA: SAspamtest->read_scoreonly_config()...");
$MailScanner::SA::SAspamtest->read_scoreonly_config($prefs);
MailScanner::Log::InfoLog("SA: Done with initialise()");

I never see the "SA: SAspamtest->read_scoreonly_config..." line in
maillog, so it appears the compile_now() call is failing.

I wrote a tiny test program that creates a new SA object (with
MailScanner's SA prefs file) and calls compile_now() on it. This worked
fine. I have not edited the etc/spam.assassin.prefs.conf file from the
distributed one.

Any suggestions on why compile_now() from within the SAspamtest object
is failing? I can't seem to trap any errors returned from
it--MailScanner just stops at that point. If someone can propose some
better debugging steps I'd be happy to try them.

Thanks!
Paul