Defunct Mailscanner process

[Howard Robinson]

Hello All,
No emails were getting to me this morning and so I had a look at
the mail server & there were multiple defunct mailscanners.
Looking at the mqueue/.in directory emails looked to have stopped
moving at around 02:10 this morning and sar shows the % idle to
have increased from 75-95 for the rest of the day to 99+ after  02:10.
I did 'mailscanner stop' and got okay messages
I did a ps -ea and it showed mailscanner defunct.
I repeated the commands and it still showed them as defunct.
I shutdown and restarted the server, it restarted fine and email it is
catching up with the backlog.
I don't recollect seeing this before although there are a few
references to defunct mailscanners in the Faq the advice was to
look for syntax error reports in Maillog to do with net::CID. I didn't
find any.
Any ideas on this? Also why would mailscanner not have restarted
at 04:00 (I thinks it 04:00 by default)?
Thanks

By the way running
Redhat 9
Sendmail 8.12.8-5.90
MailScanner 4.28.6-1
Perl v5.90
Spamassassin 2.55
Thanks



Regards

Howard Robinson
(Senior Technical Development Officer)
Harper Adams University College
Edgmond
Newport
Shropshire
TF10 8NB UK

E-mail: hrobinson at harper-adams.ac.uk
Tel.  : +44(0)1952 820280 Via switchboard
      : +44(0)1952 815253 Direct line
Fax.  : +44(0)1952 814783
College Web site http://www.harper-adams.ac.uk