Defunct Mailscanner process

[Julian Field]

At 14:37 16/03/2004, you wrote:
>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.

You need to give it 20 seconds or so to shut down gracefully. If you see
all the defunct processes then it is still shutting down. Wait 20 seconds
and have another look.

>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

--
Julian Field
www.MailScanner.info
MailScanner thanks transtec Computers for their support

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