Re: Sudden instability

[Dan Nelson]

In the last episode (Jul 02), Todd Lyons said:
> Dan Nelson wanted us to know:
> >It could be that there's a new spam sender out there with unusual
> >header or HELO information that happens to crash the milter.  The
> >report_safe stuff shouldn't make any difference.  I believe the
> >redhat
> 
> Turns out that it did.  I reverted the change on mx1 and mx3, leaving
> mx2 as the only machine with the report_safe 0 setting.  Over the
> past 24 hours, only mx2 has crashed (about 5 times since this time
> yesterday).
 
That's interesting.  Spamass-milter actually replaces the body on spams
even if it's unchanged, so the only real difference between your before
and after cases should have been the replacement of Content-Type:,
which shouldn't really make any difference.  I don't run report_safe on
my systems so I have never personally run through this codepath.  I'll
turn it on on my personal box, but I only get ~20 spams a day so it may
take a while to die :)

> >RPMs include all the crashing fixes made to CVS since 0.2.0, so if it's
> 
> I don't think I used the RedHat RPM, I rolled my own.  I can't find
> my srpm or my spec file any more, I think I built it on a box that
> we've since reimaged to a Gentoo box.

Then you may be missing the "empty-body" patch, which fixed a crash on
a message with no body at all.
 
> > crashing it's a new bug.  A stack trace might help, or if the
> > machine is fast enough, run the milter for a while under valgrind
> > and see if it generates any errors.  I only get around 7k
> > messages/day here, and valgrind doesn't cause enough load to be a
> > problem on a 500Mhz box.
> 
> I might be able to do that.  I've inherited a few other projects
> recently but I'll spend some time on it as I can.  I've never used
> valgrind before, and I'll have to rebuild the rpms in order to get a
> version capable of a stack trace, so my progress on giving you
> reliable information will be slow.

Valgrind is easy to use.  You just stick "valgrind" in front of the
commandline and it does the rest.  Newer valgrinds require the
--tool=memcheck flag.  The milter itself does so little work compared
to spamd that you will probably not even notice valgrind.

-- 
        Dan Nelson
        address@hidden