All children die of old age - none respawned

[James Gray]

Greetings All,

We have a FreeBSD 4.6+MailScanner 4.29-7[1]+SA 2.63+NAI VirusScan server
running on some very capable hardware[2] in our data centre.  However, twice
in the last two weeks it has failed in a strange way.  The parent
"MailScanner" process will be running but there are no child workers (I know
child labour is banned under UN provisions, but this is a bit extreme :P).

The last few entries by MailScanner in the log simply say the children are
dying due to old age, but there are no new children spawned to replace them.
These are interspersed with some processing but basically the situation is
that over about a 20 minute period all the children die due to old age but
none are respawned.  Children are configured to have a 4 hour life cycle on
our system and normally this isn't a problem.  When we have no mail flowing
though users will scream (like they do) - this gateway box serves our global
mail system.  Our company has offices in APAC, Europe and the USA, so 4
hours without mail is a killer :(

Last night a well-meaning but unqualified engineer decided rebooting the
entire server was a good idea in trying to get the mail flowing again and
nuked my 361 days of uptime! ARGH!! :(  The last time this 'no children'
problem occurred giving the MailScanner parent the HUP signal fixed it.

I'll be upgrading to MS-4.30-2[1] today but does anyone here have any other
ideas where to look?  Is this a "known" problem that's been fixed in the new
version?  This server has been running MailScanner for about 8 months without
a problem apart from these two recent outages. :(

Regards,

James

[1] Tar ball version, NOT the FreeBSD"ports" version.
[2] Compaq Proliant 380-G2,  1 x P3 1.2GHz, 1GB RAM, 76GB SCSI-U160 15K RPM
hardware RAID-5 with 128MB cache, 2 x 1Gbps ethernet (1 internet, the other
LAN) and /var/spool/MailScanner/incoming mounted in tmpfs.

-------------------------- MailScanner list ----------------------
To leave, send    leave mailscanner    to jiscmail at jiscmail.ac.uk
Before posting, please see the Most Asked Questions at
http://www.mailscanner.biz/maq/     and the archives at
http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/mailscanner.html