MailWatch Stops logging sascore & sareport

[Anthony Peacock]

Hi Kai,

Kai Schaetzl wrote:
> Anthony Peacock wrote on Tue, 09 May 2006 09:44:33 +0100:
> 
>> I originally posted this to the MailWatch users list, and although I 
>> have had some help I still have the problem.  I am posting this here in 
>> the hope that someone on this list might have seen this problem before 
>> and can give some pointers.
> 
> Anthony, I followed that partly on the mailwatch list. Ahm, what I didn't 
> see is any mention of DBI version etc. There is a DBI version that the old 
> mailwatch didn't work with. If you use the new MailWatchLogging it is 
> still possible that there is some DBI problem. Have you tried to setup a 
> similar machine and reproduce the problem?

Thanks for your reply.

DBI is 1.50  DBD::mysql is 3.0002_3

The interesting thing is that the logging works fine for a number of 
days then suddenly starts to log sascore and sareport as NULL, 
everything else carries on working OK.  I haven't really been able to 
work out what the triggering event is or replicate the problem.

It is not really possible for me to set up a different machine to debug 
this at the moment.  However, in looking through my config I did notice 
something that wasn't working quite correctly.

Before I go any further... I don't use Julian's install scripts (for 
various reasons).

I have been using /opt/MailScanner/bin/cron/check_MailScanner.cron as 
cron job every 15 minutes to check that MailScanner is still running.  I 
have been doing this (or calling /opt/MailScanner/bin/check_mailscanner 
before that) for ages, and had been redirecting the output to /dev/null 
because of the noise earlier versions used to generate.  I hadn't 
noticed the introduction of the -q quiet mode option, I also hadn't 
noticed that check_MailScanner.cron does some basic locking in 
/var/lock.  Because I was dumping the output to the bit bucket I hadn't 
been aware that /var/lock didn't exist on my system.  And therefore the 
basic locking wasn't working as expected.

The reason that I think this might be relevant is that I was once able 
to cause the logging to stop working properly by running a debug attempt 
at the same time as the check_MailScanner cron job tried to run.  This 
made me wonder if the cron job was tripping over itself or something else.

I have now thoroughly checked the system, MailScanner runs without error 
in debug mode, DBItrace looks fine, SpamAssassin debug looks OK and the 
cron jobs are OK.  I will let this run for a while and see if it fails 
again.


-- 
Anthony Peacock
CHIME, Royal Free & University College Medical School
WWW:    http://www.chime.ucl.ac.uk/~rmhiajp/
"The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new 
discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' but 'That's funny....'" -- Isaac Asimov