First MailScanner child freezes

[Peter Kruit]

Hello,

I'm currently testing MailScanner with Spamassassin for later
implementation on our productions servers. To test MailScanner with a
high volume of e-mail, I copied the mqueue directory from one of our
productions servers which contained about 8000 e-mails. At first
everything looked fine and all e-mail was processed. When I looked
closer, however, I found out that MailScanner left 30 e-mails in the
mqueue.in directory and left the same amount (with corresponding IDs) in
the incoming directory of one of the children. Further investigation
showed that I had one child more running then I should have (in
MailScanner.conf I set Max Children to 5, normal would be to see 6 (1
parent + 5 children), but I had 7). After giving the parent process a
TERM signal, this one child didn't die. The logfile told me the
following:

Mar  2 19:39:43 xx MailScanner[8100]: SpamAssassin timed out and was
killed, consecutive failure 1 of 20
Mar  2 19:39:47 xx MailScanner[8100]: Message i22AcqG11276 from
127.0.0.1 (mailer-daemon) to listmanager.smallcapmarketwatch.com is not
spam, SpamAssassin (timed out)
Mar  2 19:39:57 xx MailScanner[8100]: RBL Check timed out and was
killed, consecutive failure 1 of 7

This was the last logging for this process. All other RBL and
Spamassassin tests worked fine.

In another test the same thing happened. The logfile entries:

Mar  3 16:46:20 xx MailScanner[12779]: SpamAssassin timed out and was
killed, consecutive failure 1 of 20
Mar  3 16:46:21 xx MailScanner[12779]: Message i22FQc0T011912 from
145.222.138.19 (nrc-html-return-nbs at nrc.nl) to xx is not spam,
SpamAssassin (timed out)
Mar  3 16:46:31 xx MailScanner[12779]: RBL Check timed out and was
killed, consecutive failure 1 of 7

In both tests 7770 e-mails were processed, except the 30 from the child
that froze.

Debug showed the following:

Starting MailScanner...
In Debugging mode, not forking...
debug: Score set 0 chosen.
debug: running in taint mode? no
debug: ignore: test message to precompile patterns and load modules
debug: using "/opt/perl/share/spamassassin" for default rules dir
debug: using "/etc/spamassassin" for site rules dir
debug: using "/opt/MailScanner/etc/spam.assassin.prefs.conf" for user
prefs file
debug: bayes: 20797 tie-ing to DB file R/O
/var/spool/MailScanner/spamassassin/bayes_toks
debug: bayes: 20797 tie-ing to DB file R/O
/var/spool/MailScanner/spamassassin/bayes_seen
debug: bayes: found bayes db version 2
debug: bayes: Not available for scanning, only 182 ham(s) in Bayes DB <
200
debug: bayes: 20797 untie-ing
debug: bayes: 20797 untie-ing db_toks
debug: bayes: 20797 untie-ing db_seen
debug: Score set 1 chosen.
debug: Initialising learner
debug: bayes: 20797 tie-ing to DB file R/O
/var/spool/MailScanner/spamassassin/bayes_toks
debug: bayes: 20797 tie-ing to DB file R/O
/var/spool/MailScanner/spamassassin/bayes_seen
debug: bayes: found bayes db version 2
debug: bayes: Not available for scanning, only 182 ham(s) in Bayes DB <
200
debug: bayes: 20797 untie-ing
debug: bayes: 20797 untie-ing db_toks
debug: bayes: 20797 untie-ing db_seen
debug: running header regexp tests; score so far=0
debug: running body-text per-line regexp tests; score so far=1.27
debug: Razor2 is not available
debug: running raw-body-text per-line regexp tests; score so far=1.27
debug: running uri tests; score so far=1.27
debug: uri tests: Done uriRE
debug: running full-text regexp tests; score so far=1.27
debug: Razor2 is not available
debug: DCCifd is not available: no r/w dccifd socket found.
debug: Current PATH is: /sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin
debug: DCC is not available: no executable dccproc found.
debug: Pyzor is not available: pyzor not found
debug: all '*From' addrs: ignore at compiling.spamassassin.taint.org
debug: all '*To' addrs:
debug: is Net::DNS::Resolver available? yes
debug: trying (3) yahoo.de...
debug: looking up MX for 'yahoo.de'
debug: MX for 'google.de' exists? 1
debug: MX lookup of google.de succeeded => Dns available (set
dns_available to hardcode)
debug: is DNS available? 1

<..>

The last few lines were:

debug: is Net::DNS::Resolver available? yes
debug: DNS MX records found: 0
debug: DNS MX records found: 0

After this, MailScanner froze.

I was wondering if this is due to the fact that I copied the mqueue from
another server. All the tests I did delivering e-mail via the MTA
processed without any problems.

Thanks,

Peter Kruit