Anyone following RELENG_5_2?

[Jesse Guardiani]

On Wednesday 21 July 2004 17:08, you wrote:
> > Jesse Guardiani wrote:
[...]

> > ClamAV and sqwebmail are the thorns in my flesh. ClamAV hangs
> > constantly, and I had to setup a monit daemon to check on it every 30
> > seconds and restart it if necessary. sqwebmail, while an excellent and
> > extremely high performance webmail interface, lacks polish in it's UI.
> > In addition, sqwebmail tends to go insane and spawn multiple CPU
> > hungry child processes. I have to watch it constantly.
>
> Really?  We've never had problems with ClamAV (currently running
> 0.72). clamdscan has been running almost non-stop for about 4 months
> now.  The only time it's stopped is for upgrades, or when I do
> something stupid and crash the server.  :)  The daemon is started via
> rc.d and messages are passed to it via amavisd-new.  Between ClamAV
> and SpamAssassin, the mail server blocks about 30,000 messages a week.

Yeah, really. I've sent multiple emails to the ClamAV folks, but they can't/won't
help me figure it out. And while I have some C programming experience, I'm
not very good at tracking down obscure, intermittent memory related bugs in
other people's C code, especially in a live system, so I've kind of given up.

I'm convinced it's a bug though. After all, you can LOOK at C code wrong
and introduce a bug.


> > Having said all that, the server itself is a 500Mhz Dell PIII running
> > rather slow hardware RAID 5. The CPU is more than adaquate for
> > everything but virus scanning, which I may break off into a higher
> > horsepower box someday.
>
> Currently, our mail filtering server is a dual-AthlonMP 2200+ with 3.5
> GB RAM with 3x200 GB HD in a RAID5 array (3Ware Escalade 7506).  It's
> very much overkill since all it does nowadays is virus and spam
> filterng, but it was originally supposed to be our IMAP, webmail, and
> SMTP server.  :)

Maybe that's why ClamAV doesn't bomb on your machine. Higher
horsepower? Dunno...


> > As for 10,000 messages, I currently have a vpopmail mailing list
> > folder that has 10474 messages. I can check it with no problems, but
> > it's access times are bordering on what I consider "slow". I mainly
> > use GMANE and KNode for mailing list reading these days.
>
> Never could narrow it down to either a FreeBSD issue or a Courier-IMAP
> issue, or a combination of both.  Running with SCHED_ULE, I could
> never get KMail or SquirrelMail to scan a folder with 10,000+ messages
> in it.  The server would crash due to not enough KVA errors or
> spinlock errors.  Running with SCHED_4BSD, I would get hardlocks when
> accessing large folders.
>
> Switching to Cyrus, though, allows me to access, view, and even move
> around, folders with 25,000+ messages in it without affecting the CPU
> load too much.
>
> Since we won't be using Courier or Cyrus for IMAP anymore, I never
> really investigated too deeply.  We're moving to IBM's Workplace2
> environment for e-mail next month.

To be honest, I really haven't been impressed with FreeBSD 5.x yet.
It's been more trouble than it's worth so far. I run 5.2.1 on my laptop,
but I've been having visions of Gentoo Linux on my servers of late.
I run Gentoo on my machine at home, and it's *nice*.

How do you like Cyrus? I considered it when I first designed my mail
server, but it seemed kind of obscure and university based, so I decided
against it. I've since wondered many times if I made the right choice.
I guess I just need to install postfix and cyrus and see if I like them.

-- 
Jesse Guardiani, Systems Administrator
WingNET Internet Services,
P.O. Box 2605 // Cleveland, TN 37320-2605
423-559-LINK (v)  423-559-5145 (f)
http://www.wingnet.net