Date: 08/30/07 (Software)    Keywords: web, linux, spam

Greetings and Salutations!
I have an interesting issue.

I am running a mail / domain controller on SELinux.
There is a webmin interface installed.
There is webmail.
The mail service is a variation of sendmail called SquirrelMail.
The mail server is also running ClamAV and SpamAssassin.

Tuesday a problem appeared around 11AM where the outbound mail service just stalls.
I starting looking at the queue and I noticed an inordinate amount of replies to bad addresses from the Mailer Daemon that are timing out. On peeking in on them I discovered that they are bouncebacks on emails sent to bad addresses here and that they are spam (no surprise there). Many of these messages are stalling in the queue and I suspected that this was the problem. Clearing the queue did not fix the issue, but restarting sendmail did and still does make the outbound process work.

So, last night, I updated ClamAV (no update needed), sendmail (update completed) and SA (update completed).
I hoped that the problem would go away but it did not. In fact, it is now worse. The frequency that I must manually restart the sendmail service has gone up.

In an effort to provide less overall interruption to my users I created a cron task to do this for me.
Here is the script:
#/bin/bash
#this is to restart sendmail
date >>/etc/mailcron.log
service sendmail stop>>/etc/mailcron.log
service sendmail start>>/etc/mailcron.log
echo "mailtab1 process done
">>/etc/mailcron.log

Now, here is the interesting part.
The cron is set to run every 10 minutes (minutes ending in 3)
It runs.
The output put into the log file when it runs automatically is incomplete:
Thu Aug 30 11:23:01 EDT 2007
mailtab1 process done

So, obviously the script it running, but it is only time-stamping and informing me that it is done.

The more interesting part is that when I run the task manually it works:
Thu Aug 30 11:25:19 EDT 2007
Shutting down sm-client: [ OK ]
Shutting down sendmail: [ OK ]
Starting sendmail: [ OK ]
Starting sm-client: [ OK ]
mailtab1 process done

WHY?

I need a solution to one (or, preferably, both) of these problems. I also have a second script that does the mailreload command.

My current plan, based on some of the mail server logs showing errors with the ClamAV milter, is to uninstall and reinstall clamav tonight afterhours. Thoughts?


Cross-posted all over the place

Source: http://community.livejournal.com/software/75058.html