MailScanner defunct processes

[Julian Field]

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Dave Jones wrote:
>>>> [root at server2 MailScanner]# grep -rl 'Error PPS' /usr/lib/perl5
>>>> /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.8/OLE/Storage_Lite.pm
>>>> [root at server2 MailScanner]#
>>>>
>>>>         
>>> Update:  The Storage_Lite.pm files are identical on the 2 servers.  I
>>> tried rpmbuild'ing the module but it looks the same.  How do I
>>> troubleshoot what is using this Perl module and can this functionality
>>> be disabled by a MailScanner.conf setting?  I don't think we use any
>>> OLE document processing.
>>>
>>> Our Nagios monitoring is now alerting us on some mail loop checks we
>>> have in place for the problem server.  Further investigating shows the
>>> we had a period of around 1 hour and 20 minutes early this morning
>>> that MailScanner did not move any messages from the inbound queue to
>>> the outbound queue.  The maillog shows 276 "is whitelisted" messages
>>> for a single message ID but that MailScanner process never goes on to
>>> the next step.  During this time period, we had almost all (if not
>>> all) of the MailScanner processes in a defunct state.  I am pretty
>>> sure that the normal MailScanner restart "woke up" the email flow
>>> based on the maillog.
>>>
>>>       
>> Any chance you could find the problem message and send me a zipped-up
>> copy of it for me to work with?
>> The only way to disable the Storage_Lite code is to comment out the
>> calls to sub "ExtractOle" in Message.pm (in
>> /usr/lib/MailScanner/MailScanner). Otherwise it is automatically used
>> whenever it sees an attachment which starts with the "magic" strings
>> that define a Microsoft Office document.
>>     
> I ended up commenting out 2 lines that were a single call to UnpackOle
> and mail is flowing again with no defunct processes.  We were up to
> about 4,000 messages in the mqueue.in this morning and rising fast due
> to an email campaign blasting out messages.  We had to do something.
> Thanks so much for your temporary fix!
>
>   
>> If we can narrow down the problem to a particular call in Storage_Lite,
>> then I can post a bugfix to the maintainer. Without it, there's little I
>> can do.
>>     
> It appears that nearly every message is causing a problem so how can I
> accurately pick out one of them that will help you troubleshoot?
>   
If nearly every message is causing a problem, finding a bundle of 
messages (most of which demonstrate the problem) should be pretty easy, 
should it not? :-)

A bundle of messages, some of which demonstrate the problem, would do 
just fine.

Jules

- -- 
Julian Field MEng CITP CEng
www.MailScanner.info
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PGP footprint: EE81 D763 3DB0 0BFD E1DC 7222 11F6 5947 1415 B654


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