MailScanner stopping

[Kevin Miller]

Last week there was a thread about MailScanner ceasing to work.  I was
seeing that behavior - it was running, but was all balled up.  Turned
out that when 'MailScanner restart' was called that some sendmail
processes persisted past the $RESTART_DELAY time.  This only appears to
happen on later MS servers.  Not sure what changes to the init script
make the difference - my 4.48 server doesn't have a problem.  

The pids that MailScanner creates all evaporate almost immediately; the
persistent sendmail processes are generally (as nearly as I can tell)
connections that smf-sav initiates.  (smf-sav is sorta like
milter-sender and milter-ahead rolled into one.)  I wasn't seeing the
problem until I installed it, but it's too nifty to get rid of even if
it's not as robust as the milters from Snertsoft.

It can take up to a minute or two for all the connections to expire.
I'm guessing the remote hosts are maybe doing greet-pause or graylisting
when I do the sender verification, which causes them to sit around for a
bit.

Anyway, my workaround was to introduce the following bit of code in
/etc/init.d/MailScanner so that the all the orphaned sendmail processes
are gone before trying to restart MailScanner.  


 restart)
    $0 stop
    # Initialize the test variable
    Pidval=sendmail
    ;;
    # Loop as long as there's a sendmail process
    while [ "$Pidval" != "" ];
    do
	  # Look for sendmail but ignore the grep
        Pidval=`ps aux | grep sendmail | grep -v grep`
        echo
        echo $Pidval
        sleep $RESTART_DELAY
    done
    $0 start
    rc_status
    ;;

FWIW, I'm running on SUSE.  Not sure if this will affect Postfix/Exim,
etc.  I assume no responsibility if it breaks your server and all that.
<g>

Hope this helps others.  Julian, et al., is free to use it in future
releases at their discretion...

...Kevin
-- 
Kevin Miller                Registered Linux User No: 307357
CBJ MIS Dept.               Network Systems Admin., Mail Admin.
155 South Seward Street     ph: (907) 586-0242
Juneau, Alaska 99801        fax: (907 586-4500