MailWatch Stops logging sascore & sareport

[Anthony Peacock]

Hi,

So much for that theory!  It starting going wrong again this afternoon, 
so that was just a matter of hours since the last restart.

I missed it starting to go wrong so couldn't really catch any idea of 
what was happening at the time.

A stop and restart of MailScanner fixes the problem.

I will keep looking into this and will post if I find out anything further.

Anthony Peacock wrote:
> 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