Inoculate scanner gets skipped after a while as if its marked busy

Julian Field mailscanner at ecs.soton.ac.uk
Sat May 8 13:19:37 IST 2004


Sounds to me as if the virus updates are hanging, which would lock out the
virus scanner. If you don't want to use update_virus_scanners, but are
still using inoculate-autoupdate then make sure you are calling it
correctly (you have to add the inoculate installation directory on the
command line, you can get the correct directory from
/etc/MailScanner/virus.scanners.conf).

This is the usual cause of these problems. Either that, or is there a
chance that inoculate is waiting for keyboard input?

At 09:34 08/05/2004, you wrote:

>Hi,
>
>firstly, I cant beleive Julian is stil so commitied.
>
>I finally upgraded to mailscanner-4.30.3-1 (from my own heavily patched
>3.13 where I helped Julian write the original inoculate code).
>
>Anyway, I love 4.30, the upgrade was pretty straight forward.
>
>My problem is my inoculate scanning stops working, and is skipped over. I
>have 4 virus scanners enabled, and the others keep going.
>
>I assume at one stage or another the inoculate doesnt return like it
>should, and it is marked as Busy.
>
>The /tmp flag for inoculate shows it is busy. (see lots of details below).
>
>I do not use the update_virus_scanners, I got rid of it out of cron, but
>apparently its not the only code that either locks things in /tmp or calls
>update_virus_scanners. Obviously, I am updating signatures myself.
>
>I have Max Children = 1 in the mailscanner.conf. But I guess that Virus
>Scanner Timeout = 300 times out on inoculate at some stage and marks it
>busy or something.
>
>Clearly when I restart it from init.d it all runs OK again for a while.
>
>I guess what I need is one of these:
>- understand why its busy and fix the condition
>- get rid of the busy
>- more agressively restart mailscanner when the condition occurs / or the
>Virus Scanner Timeout times out
>- move over to update_virus_scanners if its significantly better.
>
>cat InoculateBusy.lock
>Virus checker locked for scanning by inoculate 3883
>
>ps ax|grep 3883
>  3883 ?        SN     0:05 /usr/bin/perl -I/usr/lib/MailScanner
> /usr/sbin/MailSc
>
>ps ax|grep Mail
>  3882 ?        SN     0:00 /usr/bin/perl -I/usr/lib/MailScanner
> /usr/sbin/MailSc
>  3883 ?        SN     0:05 /usr/bin/perl -I/usr/lib/MailScanner
> /usr/sbin/MailSc
>16461 pts/9    S      0:00 grep Mail

--
Julian Field
www.MailScanner.info
Professional Support Services at www.MailScanner.biz
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