RHEL 3, sendmail and lock type

[Greg Matthews]

Jens Ahlin wrote:
> So what you are saying is that flock is the one to use. The reason for
> asking is that broken queue files are building up in the mqueue.in
> directory, only the df files are present not the qf files. I don't know if
> this is related to a new problem causing messages to be delayed several
> hours. ( in the maillog I see A LOT of "SpamAssassin cache hit for
> message" for the messages that gets delayed. ) The server is not busy,
> load average < 0.3. Mail is not lost, just delayed, the broken queue files
> are all junk mail.

yes... that happens. I'm on CentOS 4.6 which uses the stock redhat 
sendmail 8.13.1. I'm using posix locking (correct for 8.13) but still 
see a slow build up of df files. I have a script that cleans up these 
files which I run a couple of times a year.

I have been told that this was a bug in older versions of sendmail and I 
assume that RH never bothered to backport the patch. However, I can't 
confirm that.

It has never been a problem for me - I'm 99.9% certain that the broken 
messages are actually dealt with correctly, just not properly cleaned up.

here's my bash script:

#!/bin/bash
# clean up orphaned df* files in mqueue.in
# no known cause for these files yet.

/etc/init.d/MailScanner stop

sleep 2
dir="/var/spool/mqueue.in"

file=`find $dir -mtime +1`
for i in ${file}
     do m=`basename ${i}`
     j=${m:2}
     if [ ! -e "${dir}/qf${j}" ]; then
         mv ${i} /var/tmp/
         fi
     done
echo
df -hl

/etc/init.d/MailScanner start

exit 0


> 
> I have flock specified in MailScanner.conf. If I change to default value
> "Lock Type = " mail is still processed and delivered using POSIX.
> 
> Any ideas ?
> 
>      Jens


-- 
Greg Matthews           01491 692445
Head of UNIX/Linux, iTSS Wallingford

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