A well-hung MailScanner :-(

[Martin Hepworth]

Mike

How are you handling the link to the file NFS with soft links or hard links.

I've seen older versions of Solaris get upset when NFS links go offline,
even when they are to soft links..

--
Martin Hepworth 
Snr Systems Administrator
Solid State Logic
Tel: +44 (0)1865 842300

> -----Original Message-----
> From: MailScanner mailing list [mailto:MAILSCANNER at JISCMAIL.AC.UK] On
> Behalf Of Mike Brudenell
> Sent: 02 November 2005 16:40
> To: MAILSCANNER at JISCMAIL.AC.UK
> Subject: [MAILSCANNER] A well-hung MailScanner :-(
> 
> Sigh.  We had an outage on our central file server today.
> 
> I really, truly thought that I'd built our mail gateways and their
> installations of MailScanner, Sophos Anti-Virus, etc to be independent of
> the central file server for exactly this eventuality, but it appears
> not...
> 
>  *  The filer went off the air at around 8:11am.
> 
>  *  At 9am the MailScanner scripts to update Sophos' IDE files kicked off.
>     Up to this point MailScanner had been happily processing the messages
>     arriving in the inbound Sendmail queue.
> 
>  *  The 9am update of Sophos appeared to go OK ... it's just MailScanner
>     didn't pick up processing e-mails again.
> 
>  *  The same happened at the 10am update.
> 
>  *  At 11:01am the filer came back online for a couple of minutes, at
> which
>     point MailScanner started processing again.
> 
>  *  The filer went offline again at 11:03am.  MailScanner continued to
> work.
> 
>  *  The filer was finally back online at 11:15am and MailScanner has
> worked
>     ever since.
> 
> When I built the installation I put Perl, Sophos, BerkeleyDB and
> MailScanner all on local disk (in /opt/york) rather than anything mounted
> from the filer, such as our shared /usr/local.
> 
> It's a rather old installation of MailScanner (4.32.5) running under
> Solaris 8.  I'm as sure as I can be that I didn't miss anything, yet it
> smacks to me of MailScanner trying to stat a lockfile, or perhaps looking
> for an executable along the PATH environment variable (which currently has
> filer-mounted directories before the local ones :-(
> 
> But I can't see anywhere that MailScanner might be doing this:
> 
>  *  The mailscnner.conf has
>         Lockfile Dir = /tmp
> 
>  *  I'd assume MailScanner restting SAVI and forking the new children
>     wouldn't involve looking for any executables along the PATH?
> 
> Does anyone have any thoughts, please?  I enclose as an attachment a
> cut'n'pasted extract from the scannerlog for that time frame.
> 
> Cheers,
> Mike B-)
> 
> --
> The Computing Service, University of York, Heslington, York Yo10 5DD, UK
> Tel:+44-1904-433811  FAX:+44-1904-433740
> 
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