MailScanner children hanging on startup when spam.lists.conf file is open by another process

[Warren Guy]

Hello everyone,

I encountered a strange problem this evening, where a colleague had 
inadvertently left open a terminal on our mail server with the 
spam.lists.conf configuration file open in vi, which seemed to cause the 
MailScanner child processes to die when they (re-)started.

At first I thought perhaps SpamAssassin or ClamAV was causing some 
problem, but the problem still occurred with spam checks and virus 
scanning disabled from MailScanner.conf.

Has anyone encountered similar behaviour? This machine is running 
MailScanner 4.64.3, Postfix 2.1, Perl 5.8.8 on FreeBSD 4.

Output from mailscanner log:

(from where MailScanner appeared to die, when the last child restarted):

Apr  2 17:22:20 (mailserver) MailScanner[53468]: MailScanner child dying 
of old age
Apr  2 17:22:20 (mailserver) MailScanner[46053]: MailScanner E-Mail 
Virus Scanner version 4.64.3 starting...

(when restarting):

Apr  2 20:56:46 (mailserver) MailScanner[35284]: MailScanner child 
caught a SIGHUP
Apr  2 20:56:46 (mailserver) MailScanner[35209]: MailScanner child 
caught a SIGHUP
Apr  2 20:56:46 (mailserver) MailScanner[33392]: MailScanner child 
caught a SIGHUP
Apr  2 20:56:46 (mailserver) MailScanner[29785]: MailScanner child 
caught a SIGHUP
Apr  2 20:56:46 (mailserver) MailScanner[46053]: MailScanner child 
caught a SIGHUP
Apr  2 20:56:53 (mailserver) MailScanner[23048]: MailScanner E-Mail 
Virus Scanner version 4.64.3 starting...
Apr  2 20:56:58 (mailserver) MailScanner[23050]: MailScanner E-Mail 
Virus Scanner version 4.64.3 starting...
Apr  2 20:57:03 (mailserver) MailScanner[23054]: MailScanner E-Mail 
Virus Scanner version 4.64.3 starting...
Apr  2 20:57:09 (mailserver) MailScanner[23058]: MailScanner E-Mail 
Virus Scanner version 4.64.3 starting...
Apr  2 20:57:14 (mailserver) MailScanner[23069]: MailScanner E-Mail 
Virus Scanner version 4.64.3 starting...

Which is where it hangs.

Output from `ps`:

postfix 25760 0.0 1.9 19936 19308 ?? I 9:05PM 0:00.11 MailScanner: 
starting children (perl5.8.8)
postfix 25561 0.0 1.9 19936 19308 ?? I 9:05PM 0:00.11 MailScanner: 
starting children (perl5.8.8)
postfix 25495 0.0 1.9 19936 19308 ?? I 9:04PM 0:00.11 MailScanner: 
starting children (perl5.8.8)
postfix 25494 0.0 1.9 19936 19308 ?? I 9:04PM 0:00.11 MailScanner: 
starting children (perl5.8.8)
postfix 25493 0.0 1.9 19936 19308 ?? I 9:04PM 0:00.12 MailScanner: 
starting children (perl5.8.8)
postfix 25492 0.0 1.8 19300 18760 ?? Is 9:04PM 0:00.01 MailScanner: 
master waiting for children, sleeping (perl5.8.8)


-- 
Warren Guy
Senior System Administrator
CalorieKing

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