Amavis is not stable under Etch: why?

Thomas Goirand · External Since: Apr 09, 2005 Posts: 149

Hi,

We have been running amavis under Sarge for YEARS (I believe from the
beginning until the end of the life of Sarge). We had no problems at
all, NOT EVEN ONE...

But since we have upgraded nearly all our servers to Etch, we are
experiencing amavis to crash. When I do "ps ax | grep amavis" it's not
running any more, and I have to restart it manually.

Did some of you had the same experience as we had, and is there a fix?
What changed so much to make this package unstable now???

Thomas Goirand

P.S: For those who will ask, it's not a memory issue, some box are not
even swapping and amavis still crashes...

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Julian De Marchi · External Since: Apr 11, 2007 Posts: 5

Thomas Goirand wrote:
> Hi,
>
> We have been running amavis under Sarge for YEARS (I believe from the
> beginning until the end of the life of Sarge). We had no problems at
> all, NOT EVEN ONE...
>
> But since we have upgraded nearly all our servers to Etch, we are
> experiencing amavis to crash. When I do "ps ax | grep amavis" it's not
> running any more, and I have to restart it manually.
>

Have been running amavis for 1 month on etch with not one problem.

Julian

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koffiejunkie · External Since: Jul 16, 2007 Posts: 1

Thomas Goirand wrote:
> Hi,
>
> We have been running amavis under Sarge for YEARS (I believe from the
> beginning until the end of the life of Sarge). We had no problems at
> all, NOT EVEN ONE...
>
> But since we have upgraded nearly all our servers to Etch, we are
> experiencing amavis to crash.

I had that happen and the problem turned out to be a typo (probably
mine) in the logrotate file. It killed amavis but never started it
again. But this was under Sarge. I have fixed this manually and since
updating to Etch have not had any problems except when my /tmp filled up.

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Thomas Goirand · External Since: Apr 09, 2005 Posts: 149

Henrique de Moraes Holschuh wrote:
> On Mon, 16 Jul 2007, Thomas Goirand wrote:
>> We have been running amavis under Sarge for YEARS (I believe from the
>> beginning until the end of the life of Sarge). We had no problems at
>> all, NOT EVEN ONE...
>>
>> But since we have upgraded nearly all our servers to Etch, we are
>> experiencing amavis to crash. When I do "ps ax | grep amavis" it's not
>> running any more, and I have to restart it manually.
>
> amavis, or amavisd-new? There is *not* any package name "amavis" in Debian
> Etch.

amavisd-new

>
> If it is amavisd-new, did you update *all* the configuration, and left-over
> stuff like cron jobs, scripts, etc. that might not be part of the package,
> but rather added locally?

This problem is also present on NEW setup from scratch, not upgraded
from Sarge, it seems.

> Here, amavisd-new doesn't croak often. In fact, I run several mailservers
> with it, and it didn't croack once since etch was released. clamav, on the
> other hand... argh. But do notice I am not using any SQL databases or
> LDAP, and these have to be taken into account if amavisd-new is crashing.

We don't either.

> All in all, if you find a "it crashes!" bug in amavisd-new, I will try to
> fix it promptly. I should have some hours of amavisd-new job time coming in
> the next few weeks. But I *need* the proper debug information to find
> whatever is causing it to crash, and that means you will have to run it in
> debug mode and find exactly where it is croaking. Either that, or you will
> have to find out what email makes it croak, and send it to me so that I can
> try to reproduce the issue.

I'd love to help, but I tried to make it verbose, and it's NOT AT ALL...
What do you recommend to make it print things in a log file?

Thomas

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Henrique de Moraes Holsch · External Since: Nov 11, 2004 Posts: 633

On Tue, 17 Jul 2007, Thomas Goirand wrote:
> > All in all, if you find a "it crashes!" bug in amavisd-new, I will try to
> > fix it promptly. I should have some hours of amavisd-new job time coming in
> > the next few weeks. But I *need* the proper debug information to find
> > whatever is causing it to crash, and that means you will have to run it in
> > debug mode and find exactly where it is croaking. Either that, or you will
> > have to find out what email makes it croak, and send it to me so that I can
> > try to reproduce the issue.
>
> I'd love to help, but I tried to make it verbose, and it's NOT AT ALL...
> What do you recommend to make it print things in a log file?

Try using /etc/init.d/amavis debug, also set $log_level to something high
in one of amavisd-new's config files.

There is documentation in /usr/share/doc/amavisd-new

--
"One disk to rule them all, One disk to find them. One disk to bring
them all and in the darkness grind them. In the Land of Redmond
where the shadows lie." -- The Silicon Valley Tarot
Henrique Holschuh

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Bazy · External Since: Jul 17, 2007 Posts: 1

Hi Thomas,

I had problems when I upgraded from sarge to etch with amavisd-new and
spamassassin 3.0 to 3.1, also with courier-authlib...

My advice to you would be to turn debugging at a level higher than 8 on
everything that ever crashed, get a coffee, and look at every line of
the log. If there are things that you don't understand from the log
please paste them here after you google-d them.

I'm sorry that my advice isn't very technical...

Thomas Goirand wrote:
> Hi,
>
> We have been running amavis under Sarge for YEARS (I believe from the
> beginning until the end of the life of Sarge). We had no problems at
> all, NOT EVEN ONE...
>
> But since we have upgraded nearly all our servers to Etch, we are
> experiencing amavis to crash. When I do "ps ax | grep amavis" it's not
> running any more, and I have to restart it manually.
>
> Did some of you had the same experience as we had, and is there a fix?
> What changed so much to make this package unstable now???
>
> Thomas Goirand
>
> P.S: For those who will ask, it's not a memory issue, some box are not
> even swapping and amavis still crashes...
>
>
>

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