Stopping MailScanner

[Furnish, Trever G]

It depends on what you want out of a "shutdown" of MailScanner.

When the init script shuts down sendmail, it stops the parent processes
(listener and queue runner), but the children spawned by the sendmail
listener to handle an incoming connection will still run until either
completion or death.

That's the same way the sendmail init script works.  The parent stops, but
children may remain to handle individual, existing connections.  No new
connections are created because the parent has stopped listening for them,
but existing connections are still allowed to complete gracefully -- unless
their killed, which happens to all processes when the system shuts down.

The current init script only needs the restart argument to restart
everything properly:
/etc/init.d/MailScanner restart

And you don't have to kill sendmail children before starting it.  You just
need to make sure the queue runner and listener aren't still running.

For that, you might try:
ps -ef |egrep '(accepting|rejecting)'
ps -ef | grep 'Queue runner'

Both of those may be slightly different depending on your platform and
sendmail version.


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Bill Anderson [mailto:billa at STERLING.NET]
> Sent: Tuesday, November 11, 2003 6:50 PM
> To: MAILSCANNER at JISCMAIL.AC.UK
> Subject: Stopping MailScanner
>
>
> When I do an /etc/init.d/MailScanner stop, the mailscanner processes
> shutdown, however, the sendmail processes are still running.
>
> Is this normal behaviour?  In previous versions shutting down
> MailScanner
> would shutdown the sendmail processes as well.
>
> Do I need to shutdown sendmail to restart MailScanner?
>
> Thanks.
>
> ps.  I posted this earlier, however, I believe my question was hard to
> understand.
>