Urgent: MailScanner apparently stopped processing...

Ron E. ree at THUNDERSTAR.NET
Thu May 8 19:25:30 IST 2003


I'm hoping someone can shed some light on this one - recently I had
MailScanner which I've implemented on RedHat 8 w/Postfix just yesterday,
abruptly stop processing mail.

I only happened to notice as the only indication was that no mail was
passing through to my internal mail/pop servers, etc.

When I checked the maillog I found only entries from the postfix demon
that receives incoming mail, nothing from MailScanner or the postfix demon
that then delivers what MailScanner gives it. All processes including the
MailScanner processes were running - in fact, MailScanner was using a
majority of cpu time. I tried manually starting up MailScanner and found
that this fact of "MailScanner starting" and "xxx messages found to be
scanned" did show up in the maillog, however, no other change, mail did
not start to flow.

I finally restarted the server and then everything started to move.

So, based on this I have a few questions:

1. Any ideas why this happened and how can I prevent it and also does
anyone have any scripts out there that detect this kindof thing and then
cleanly shut down mailscanner and restart it?

2. I realized I don't even know how to cleanly shut down MailScanner
manually. This may seem a stupid question but if someone could answer it
that would be great.

3. I noticed that one of my postfixes (the one that handles the incoming
smtp traffic) is logging in UTC instead of my timezone, while MailScanner
and the other postfix is in my timezone. The config files for the
postfixes are nearly identical - anyone know how to fix this?

4. I have an error message repeatedly showing up in the maillog that I
have been unable to discover the cause of. It is:
smtp MailScanner[xxxx]: Batch: Found invalid queue file for message xxxxxx


Thanks in advance.

-Ron



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