Mailscanner leaves two running processes when restarting

[Rasmus Bøg Hansen]

Julian Field <mailscanner at ECS.SOTON.AC.UK> writes:

> At 10:08 19/05/2003, you wrote:
>>Hello Mailscanner gurus
>
> I have just discovered from the bottom of your message that you are
> still running 3.27. This is at least a year old now, and it's about
> time Debian updated their distribution.

I think so too (it's not even in unstable). However it worked fine
with the same versions of software on another machine, so I thought it
might be a known problem.

>>mail     11612  0.1  9.8 23272 12624 ?       S    09:00   0:06 [mailscanner]
>>mail     13598  0.6 15.8 23212 20284 ?       S    10:00   0:04 [mailscanner]

>>This results in the two running mailscanners trying to scan messages
>>at the same time:
>
> The output of the "ps" command changed completely with a recent glibc
> upgrade. As a result, check_mailscanner (called by an hourly cron job)
> totally fails, and attempts to start another MailScanner process. If
> you want to see how to do it these days, take a look in any recent
> version of MailScanner and transplant the guts of the current
> check_mailscanner into your old version.

Ah. You have guided me towards the light. The process is listed as
[mailscanner] instead of /usr/sbin/mailscanner which is - as you
suggest - why check_mailscanner fails.

> If Debian won't/can't keep their distribution even vaguely up to date,
> there's not much I can do. Their current release is at least a year
> old, and no longer works properly with the rest of their
> distribution. I always believed they were fanatical about back-porting
> compatibility fixes so that everything kept working, but clearly not
> in this case :-( If someone else fancies taking over the Debian
> distribution, and can keep it up to date, then I would welcome it.

At least I will file a bug report!

> Do you still have a cron job in place that is trying to start version
> 3 at the same time as version 4 is running? That's the most common
> cause of this problem.

No, I have only version 3.27 on the machine.

Thanks so far; I will let you know, if I make any progress.

/Rasmus

-- 
-- [ Rasmus "Møffe" Bøg Hansen ] ---------------------------------------
I don't suffer from insanity, i enjoy every minute of it!
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