Urgent: MailScanner apparently stopped processing...

[Ron E.]

On Fri, 9 May 2003, Julian Field wrote:

> At 19:25 08/05/2003, you wrote:
> >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.
>
> But was it scanning after you restarted?
>

Yes, it was scanning after I restarted, however it was using max of both
CPUs in my system. After letting it run that way for awhile, I used
check_mailscanner to find it's PIDs, then I killed it and restarted and
then the CPU use was more normaly.

> Have you use redhat-switchmail-nox to set which email system RedHat thinks
> it is trying to run?
>

Yes, this is set on postfix

> >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.
>
> service MailScanner stop
>
> You can do "service MailScanner" to get a list of the command options you
> can give it.
> Does "service MailScanner start" work cleanly, or does it output any errors?
>

I get: bash: service: command not found

This may be because when I first installed MailScanner, it would hang on
startup - I had to boot in single user mode, & rename the MailScanner init
script in init.d - additionally my incoming postfix was not starting
automatically either, so I added the postfix.in startup command and
check_mailscanner to rc.local. I think what was happening before that is
that MailScanner was trying to start before both postfixes were starting.

> >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
>
> For some reason it thinks one of your incoming queue files is corrupt. It
> needs to be able to find the sender and recipient addresses, and the last
> hop IP address, in the file it lifts from the queue.
>
> Can you send me one of the files from /var/spool/postfix.in/deferred that
> exhibits this problem.
> Then I can improve the Postfix parser to stop it happening again.
> --
> Julian Field
> www.MailScanner.info
> MailScanner thanks transtec Computers for their support
>

On the invalid messasge, is it save to remove it out of the deferred
directory? If it is the only thing in it's folder, is it also safe to
remove the folder? I checked and the message looks pretty mangled... but
then again I'm not sure how readable the files in that format are supposed
to be.


Is there any script you know of that can detect MailScanner not processing
anything, kill it and restart? Or set of an alarm or something?

Also, any ideas on why postfix.in is doing all it's timestamps in UTC
while postfix & MailScanner are not?

Thanks Julian!