sa-update, the untold story...

[Kevin Miller]

Being generally adverse to adopting new 'features' before anybody else,
I haven't activated sa-update on my mail servers until this morning.  I
just spent the past couple hours reading everything in the archives with
'sa-update' in it; seems that it's been causing confusion since at least
last April or so.  Anyway, here's my current understanding of the
critter as it relates to MailScanner.  If I'm missing something, I hope
someone will clue me in as the only thing that gets my users more riled
up than spam would be the Boston Pops doing Muzak covers of Nirvana
tunes.

So, here's what I've gleaned.

1:  Sometimes sa-update blows up on the first run.  Therefore, run it
manually at 
    least once before enabling it in /etc/cron.daily/sa-update, and
verify that 
    the /var/lib/spamassassin exists. (Edit it first to enable it.)

2:  I *think* the proper setting in MailScanner.conf is: 
      SpamAssassin Local State Dir = /var/lib/spamassassin
    Earlier versions of MailScanner just had /var/lib.  This should be
uncommented
    after a successful sa-update run.

3:  sa-update should be run after a spamassassin update to be sure the
proper rules 
    being looked at.

4:  sa-update will return 0 after a successful update, and 1 after a
successful run
    but no update found.  This 'breaks' cron reporting.  Possible
solutions include
    taking it out of cron.daily and running it in crontab, or modifying
the MS provided
    script in cron.daily to return 0 when the SA supplied sa-update
returns either 0 or 
    1.  Or leaving it disabled and running it manually from time to
time.
    An rc greater than 4 indicates it bit the dust.

Does that all look correct?  

Also, I think it would be helpful to have notes at the end of the
ClamAV/SA installer detailing the steps, similar to what Julian does now
with MailScanner regarding upgrading (run upgrade_MailScanner_Conf blah
blah blah).

S'later...

...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