sa-update, the untold story...

[Glenn Steen]

On 25/01/07, Kevin Miller <Kevin_Miller at ci.juneau.ak.us> wrote:
> 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).
>
Pretty much covers it, yes, at least AFAICS... Go type it into the
wiki, before you forget;-)

-- 
-- Glenn
email: glenn < dot > steen < at > gmail < dot > com
work: glenn < dot > steen < at > ap1 < dot > se