SA stopped working for some reason

[Frank Luedke <fr...@secudos.de>]

  Hi there.

  I have a RHEL-3 machine running here as a mail
 relay. ClamAV and SA are working with sendmail
 via milter to clean up all incoming emails. The
 last two weeks this worked without any problems.

  Today I saw that no spam was filtered out, only
 the ClamAV was still running. According to the
 process list, the spamd was still running
 (no zombie). In the maillog i found a lot of this
 error messages:

mailfilter spamd[5374]: prefork: syswrite(8) failed, retrying... at
/usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.0/Mail/SpamAssassin/SpamdForkScaling.pm
line 554.

  I've already searched the web for this error but found
 nothing. Can someone tell me what could cause this problem
 and maybe how to fix it?

Thanks,
 Frank

Re: SA stopped working for some reason

[Matt Kettler <mk...@evi-inc.com>]

Frank Luedke wrote:
>   Hi there.
> 
>   I have a RHEL-3 machine running here as a mail
>  relay. ClamAV and SA are working with sendmail
>  via milter to clean up all incoming emails. The
>  last two weeks this worked without any problems.
> 
>   Today I saw that no spam was filtered out, only
>  the ClamAV was still running. According to the
>  process list, the spamd was still running
>  (no zombie). In the maillog i found a lot of this
>  error messages:
> 
> mailfilter spamd[5374]: prefork: syswrite(8) failed, retrying... at
> /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.0/Mail/SpamAssassin/SpamdForkScaling.pm
> line 554.
> 

I don't know what would cause the problem, but I can give you some hints based
on looking at the code.

the function which generates that message appears to be used when spamd tries to
open a socket and command one of it's children.

It appears there's a bug open on his, and it reportedly clears up (for a time)
if you restart spamd.

http://bugzilla.spamassassin.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4590