Re: [vps-mail] Question

[Scott Wiersdorf <scottw@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, Sep 16, 2003 at 09:34:47AM -0700, Abigail Marshall wrote:
> SW> On Mon, Sep 15, 2003 at 10:08:23PM -0700, Abigail Marshall wrote:
> 
> SW> The DB_File that comes with your VPS should be adequate. When did you
> SW> begin to get locking problems?
> 
> Consistently.  It seems to particularly get to be a problem
> when the bayes_toks file grows to 5k or more.  I've lost
> Bayes database at least 4 times. (Usually able to restore
> with getback - however the point is that the database
> regularly becomes corrupted and needs to be replaced).

Just a thought, but could the copy you're pulling out of backup
corrupt? I assume that you've completely started over more than once
to make sure this isn't the case and it still gets corrupted.

> SW> You may want to try serializing your pipe through spamassassin if
> SW> you're not already:
> 
> SW>     :0 fw: spamassassin.lock
> SW>     |/usr/local/bin/spamassassin
> 
> Running spamd:
> 
> :0fw
> |/usr/local/bin/spamc -p 1783 -s 75000
> 
> 
> Should this be changed to:
> 
> :0fw spamassassin.lock
> |/usr/local/bin/spamc -p 1783 -s 75000

Close. You'll need a second colon in there:

    :0fw: spamassassin.lock
    |/usr/local/bin/spamc -p 1783 -s 75000

> (I thought with the daemon, the messages would be queued in
> any event, since there is only one instance running)

No, procmail will fork as much as it needs to for incoming mail. By
locking this recipe, you ensure that this recipe can only be called
by one instance of procmail at at time. As I mentioned before, SA
should be responsible to make sure that Bad Things aren't happening
to the databases, but it's not.

> LOL. It definitely is an sa-learn issue - actually I
> reported it as a bug to Spamassassin, because I can tell
> already from debugging that if sa-learn encounters an error
> (inability to access file, time out or out of memory), it
> will go right ahead and continue it's processes, overwriting
> data - whereas it really should create a temporary copy of
> files and simply abort and restore the temp file if any sort
> of error is encountered.

That's my assessment too. If you're not already subscribed to the
spamassassin developer's list, you might want to. You can then try out
patches and stuff as they become available. That may be more work than
it's worth, though; waiting for the next version will probably be more
painless, especially if you have a workaround.

Scott
-- 
Scott Wiersdorf
scottw@xxxxxxxxxxxx
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