MailScanner defunct processes

[Dave Jones]

I have installed the latest beta code 4.69.6-1 to test the latest
feature that Julian added for us.  I have installed this version on 4
servers with nearly identical configurations.  Three of the four
servers are running perfectly.  Two of these servers are identical.
One of the 2 twin servers (call it "server2") is running perfectly but
the second one starts up it's children and 15 or 16 of the 20
MailScanner processes go defunct after apparently running through a
batch of processing. Four to five MailScanner processes appear to be
normal either "waiting for messages", "checking with SpamAssassin", or
 "MCP checks", etc.

[root at server2 MailScanner]# ps -ef | grep MailScanner
root      8594     1  0 20:56 ?        00:00:00 MailScanner: starting child
root     17727  8594  2 21:06 ?        00:00:03 MailScanner: checking
with SpamAssassin
root     18639  8594  0 21:07 ?        00:00:00 [MailScanner] <defunct>
root     18723  8594  0 21:07 ?        00:00:00 [MailScanner] <defunct>
root     18787  8594  1 21:07 ?        00:00:00 [MailScanner] <defunct>
root     18856  8594  1 21:07 ?        00:00:00 [MailScanner] <defunct>
root     18929  8594  1 21:07 ?        00:00:00 [MailScanner] <defunct>
root     19012  8594  1 21:07 ?        00:00:00 [MailScanner] <defunct>
root     19125  8594  1 21:07 ?        00:00:00 [MailScanner] <defunct>
root     19188  8594  1 21:07 ?        00:00:00 [MailScanner] <defunct>
root     19259  8594  1 21:07 ?        00:00:00 [MailScanner] <defunct>
root     19333  8594  1 21:08 ?        00:00:00 [MailScanner] <defunct>
root     19407  8594  2 21:08 ?        00:00:00 [MailScanner] <defunct>
root     19478  8594  2 21:08 ?        00:00:00 [MailScanner] <defunct>
root     19554  8594  2 21:08 ?        00:00:00 [MailScanner] <defunct>
root     19656  8594  3 21:08 ?        00:00:00 [MailScanner] <defunct>
root     19737  8594  3 21:08 ?        00:00:00 [MailScanner] <defunct>
root     19805  8594  5 21:08 ?        00:00:00 [MailScanner] <defunct>
root     19871  8594  8 21:08 ?        00:00:00 [MailScanner] <defunct>
root     19925  8594 10 21:08 ?        00:00:00 MailScanner: checking
with SpamAssassin
root     19992 19925  0 21:08 ?        00:00:00 MailScanner: checking
with SpamAssassin
root     19993  8594  0 21:08 ?        00:00:00 MailScanner: waiting
for messages
root     19996 17727  0 21:08 ?        00:00:00 MailScanner: checking
with SpamAssassin
[root at server2 MailScanner]# MailScanner --debug
In Debugging mode, not forking...
Trying to setlogsock(unix)
SpamAssassin temp dir = /mnt/ramdisk/SpamAssassin-Temp
Use of uninitialized value in concatenation (.) or string at
/usr/lib/perl5/vendor_perl/5.8.8/Mail/SpamAssassin.pm line 1088.
Use of uninitialized value in concatenation (.) or string at
/usr/lib/perl5/vendor_perl/5.8.8/Mail/SpamAssassin.pm line 1090.
Building a message batch to scan...
Have a batch of 30 messages.
Error PPS:0
[root at server2 MailScanner]# MailScanner -v
Running on
Linux server2 2.6.18-53.el5 #1 SMP Wed Oct 10 16:34:19 EDT 2007 x86_64
x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
This is Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server release 5.1 (Tikanga)
This is Perl version 5.008008 (5.8.8)

This is MailScanner version 4.69.6
Module versions are:
1.00    AnyDBM_File
1.20    Archive::Zip
1.04    Carp
2.007   Compress::Zlib
1.119   Convert::BinHex
2.27    Date::Parse
1.00    DirHandle
1.05    Fcntl
2.74    File::Basename
2.09    File::Copy
2.01    FileHandle
1.08    File::Path
0.19    File::Temp
0.90    Filesys::Df
1.35    HTML::Entities
3.56    HTML::Parser
2.37    HTML::TokeParser
1.23    IO
1.14    IO::File
1.13    IO::Pipe
2.02    Mail::Header
1.86    Math::BigInt
3.05    MIME::Base64
5.425   MIME::Decoder
5.425   MIME::Decoder::UU
5.425   MIME::Head
5.425   MIME::Parser
3.03    MIME::QuotedPrint
5.425   MIME::Tools
0.11    Net::CIDR
0.16    OLE::Storage_Lite
1.09    POSIX
1.19    Scalar::Util
1.78    Socket
1.4     Sys::Hostname::Long
0.13    Sys::Syslog
1.68    Time::HiRes
1.02    Time::localtime

Optional module versions are:
1.36    Archive::Tar
0.21    bignum
missing Business::ISBN
missing Business::ISBN::Data
missing Data::Dump
1.814   DB_File
1.13    DBD::SQLite
1.56    DBI
1.10    Digest
1.01    Digest::HMAC
2.36    Digest::MD5
2.10    Digest::SHA1
missing Encode::Detect
missing Error
0.19    ExtUtils::CBuilder
missing ExtUtils::ParseXS
2.35    Getopt::Long
missing Inline
missing IO::String
1.05    IO::Zlib
2.24    IP::Country
missing Mail::ClamAV
3.002004        Mail::SpamAssassin
missing Mail::SPF
missing Mail::SPF::Query
0.2808  Module::Build
missing Net::CIDR::Lite
0.63    Net::DNS
missing Net::DNS::Resolver::Programmable
missing Net::LDAP
missing NetAddr::IP
missing Parse::RecDescent
missing SAVI
2.52    Test::Harness
missing Test::Manifest
1.95    Text::Balanced
1.35    URI
missing version
0.66    YAML
[root at server2 MailScanner]#

-- 
Dave Jones