RE: SpamAssassin Causing Server Startup Failure

["Dale W Hodge" <dwh@neuralmatrix.org>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Gene Grimm [mailto:elessar@noi.net]

> During the past couple of days I have noticed log entries showing that
> spamassassin's daemon refused connections from spamc on our two mail
> servers. Today, our local mail server was so bogged down I was forced to
> reset it. When 'initd' got to spamassassin, the server just hung and would
> not continue the boot process. I waited for almost five minutes but it
> didn't time out or continue. I was forced to mount the drive in another
> system without local mail services (only nullmailer) and disable the
> /etc/rcX.d/S19spamassassin links for spamd. Just as a precaution, I disabled
> spamassassin on the remote server as well. I have not yet tried to simply
> turn off spamd in /etc/defaults/spamassassin but have one non-critical
> server I can try this in. Unfortunately, I don't quite know how to force a
> Debian server to stay in runlevel 1 during the boot process.
>
> If anyone knows why this was happening and/or how to fix it, I would be most
> appreciative.

Hum... A similar thing happened to me today. The load got so high it brought my
system to it's knees. I ended up forcing a reboot to fix it.  I reset the config
with -L (perform local tests only) -m10 (limit children to max of 10) -S (Stop
check as soon as spam threshold is reached to improve performance).  So far the
load has dropped to near normal levels. I'm thinking the root problem is a
network connectivity problem.  I know it normally does some lookups and tries to
connect to several spam databases. I've been having some network issues, so I
suspect that's the problem here.

Hope this helps some.

--dwh

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Dale W Hodge - dwh@neuralmatrix.org
Vice Chairman & Secretary - info@aclug.org
Air Capital Linux User's Group  (ACLUG)
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