Re: milter errors.

[Chris Crowley]

I have found that this error usually results from spamd failing.  I run
spamd on a different system than the servers which connect via the
milter.  We have multiple mail servers all querying the same spamd server.

Quick numbers on one of our inbox servers indicate 2,300 failures
("Milter (spamassassin): to error state") over the course of 84,000
messages.

I have a check that runs every minute on each mail server, and on the
spamd server to be sure the milter is available and that spamd server is
responding promptly.

I don't know if resources are your problem.  But, I would suggest
checking and logging failures of spamd as a first step.

To check if the mitler is running, just test for the existence of the
socket you use.  Here's the script that I use for spamd.  It requires
netcat (nc).  Lastly, the biggest bottleneck seems to be DNS tests for
spamd.

Sorry for the digression from the milter aspect of the question, but I
think that the problem could be in spamd's response.  This is a decent
way to test if that is the case.

<script>
#!/bin/sh

LOCKFILE=/tmp/spamd-check.lock
if [ -f $LOCKFILE ]
then
        echo "Exiting. Lock file $LOCKFILE exists."
else
        touch $LOCKFILE

        net_test="`echo quit | nc -w 45 localhost 783 | head -1|cut -f1
-d\" \"
| cut -f1 -d"/"`"

        echo "|$net_test|"


        if [ "$net_test" != "SPAMD" ]

        then
                echo `date` spamd-check failed >> /var/log/spamd.log

                /etc/init.d/spamd restart
                wait
        else
                echo `date` spamd-check ok >> /var/log/spamd.log

        fi

        rm -f $LOCKFILE
fi

</script>


Miles Mawyer wrote:
> I keep getting numoreous errors related to the milter and I'm trying to 
> figure out why, and/or what they mean. Below are some excerpts of the log 
> files.  Message seem to be skipped a lot as well, I'll see that they passed 
> through the milter server however they have no spamassassion headers? 
> 
> What do I need to do to figure out whats going on.  
> It's a dual xeon 2.4g with 3gigs of ram.  I'm running 10 spamd children and 
> ending up with about 300ms left of memory on average.  Seems kinda steep. Any 
> idea?
> 
> 


-- 
Christopher Crowley
address@hidden
(504) 314-2535
Network Administrator
Technology Services

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