Mailscanner stuck in endless loop

[halfgaar]

Binary package hint: mailscanner

Mailscanner is stuck in an endless loop; it scans the messages held in the postfix queue again and again and there are no "requeue" notices, like on a working server. In the mean time, server is incapable of processing mail, unless the scanner is disabled, and in my case, Postfix does not hold incoming messages.

Where MailScanner --lint on Debian 5 says (including the = characters):

(..snip...)
===========================================================================
Filename Checks: Windows/DOS Executable (1 eicar.com)
Other Checks: Found 1 problems
Virus and Content Scanning: Starting
===========================================================================

It says this on Ubuntu 10.04:

(..snip...)
===========================================================================
Insecure dependency in chown while running with -T switch at /usr/share/MailScanner//MailScanner/Message.pm line 2407.

It seems to crash there.

In [1] (post 11), it is explained how adding "-c ${user}" to the init script to make mailscanner run as a different user seemed to work.

Affected versions:
According to [1], it started in Ubuntu 9.10. My Ubuntu is 10.04.
My Mailscanner version = 4.74.16-1
Postfix = 2.7.0-1ubuntu0.1
Perl: 5.10.1-8ubuntu2.1

More information can be found at [2], my question at serverfault about it I asked earlier.

Priority is high, in my opinion, because the server just can't operate.

[1] http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1313599
[2] http://serverfault.com/questions/265827/mailscanner-stuck-in-endless-loop

[halfgaar (wiebe-halfgaar)]

I confirmed that running "MailScanner --lint" as user postfix (which it should, according to my configuration) doesn't give that error. I set postfix' shell to /bin/bash and ran

su -c "MailScanner --lint" postfix

successfully.

The fix posted in that forum post (adding -c ${user} to the start-stop-daemon command) may work, but it's not the way it should (for one, my working Debian install doesn't have this). Apparently, MailScanner doesn't set its run-as user properly, even though ps axu shows:

postfix 11138 0.2 3.3 106580 33892 ? SNs 09:34 0:00 MailScanner: starting children
postfix 11139 7.2 0.0 0 0 ? ZN 09:34 0:01 [MailScanner] <defunct>
postfix 11173 10.0 0.0 0 0 ? ZN 09:34 0:01 [MailScanner] <defunct>
postfix 11269 15.8 0.0 0 0 ? ZN 09:34 0:01 [MailScanner] <defunct>
postfix 11303 26.2 0.0 0 0 ? ZN 09:34 0:01 [MailScanner] <defunct>
postfix 11354 70.5 8.1 174156 82940 ? SN 09:35 0:01 MailScanner: checking with Spam Lists
postfix 11364 2.0 7.9 178376 80976 ? RNs 09:35 0:00 MailScanner: checking with Spam Lists

[Stefan Lesicnik (stefanlsd)]

I have this problem after updates to a working Mailscanner system on Lucid. It may be related to the recent update of

perl (5.10.1-8ubuntu2, 5.10.1-8ubuntu2.1), perl-base (5.10.1-8ubuntu2, 5.10.1-8ubuntu2.1), perl-modules (5.10.1-8ubuntu2, 5.10.1-8ubuntu2.1), libperl5.10 (5.10.1-8ubuntu2, 5.10.1-8ubuntu2.1)

[Stefan Lesicnik (stefanlsd)]

Downgrading perl did help - but mdeslaur pointed out http://lists.mailscanner.info/pipermail/mailscanner/2011-April/097828.html

Seems like this is a Mailscanner bug (there is a work around there).

[thulle (thulle)]

I'm affected after a recent upgrade to natty too, though a little differently.
In syslog i was getting a lot of:
MailScanner: Process did not exit cleanly, returned 9 with signal 0

Which after starting with debug = yes gave me;
Insecure dependency in open while running with -T switch at /usr/share/MailScanner//MailScanner/Lock.pm line 358.

This seems to be related, and the workaround in http://lists.mailscanner.info/pipermail/mailscanner/2011-April/097813.html
"adding the -U switch in the showbang line in /usr/sbin/MailScanner." works.