[SA-exim] Re: SA-Exim timeout

[Marc MERLIN]

On Sun, Oct 20, 2002 at 11:32:18PM +0100, Tim Jackson wrote:
> Marc, 

[Answering on the list, because this may affect more than just you]

> Just a quickie before I go to bed - any quick ideas about how exim might
> time SA-Exim out, when I've got it set to explicitly time spamd out after
> 4 minutes? I've just had another quick look through the code and I can't
> figure out where it might have stalled.

Right. I've noticed that  too, and honestly, I'm not too  sure, it's not
supposed to happen. I'm pretty sure I had tested that when I wrote the
timeout feature.
When do you get the timemout? Are you trying to stall the sender or is
spamd just taking too long to answer?

If the C coders can look at:
http://marc.merlins.org/linux/exim/files/sa-exim-cvs/sa-exim.c

In both teergrube and and stallsender, I do
	    /* Exim might want to stop us if we run for too long, but that's
	     * exactly what we're trying to do, so let's override that */
	    alarm(0);

Otherwise, all the code also gets
	    signal(SIGALRM, alarm_handler);
	    alarm (SAtimeout);

If the SA alarm quicks in, you should get this in your log:
log_write(0, LOG_MAIN | LOG_REJECT, "SA: spamd took more than %d secs to run, accepting message", SAtimeout);

I know this code works at least sometimes because I am getting this message
in my exim logs from time to time.

So the question is when does it not work?
Is it since you switched to exim 4.10 or a more recent sa-exim?

How about other people? Are you seeing this too?
Are you just doing rejection/tagging or also talling the sender on high spam
scores?

> I've just noticed today (since I upgraded to 2.1, and did various other
> hacks including adding exiscan) that one odd message this evening got
> timed out *by exim* (not internally within SA-Exim) when it was in
> SA-Exim:
> 2002-10-20 22:02:46 183N8i-00086l-00 local_scan() function timed out -
> message temporarily rejected

Right. I'm seeing this  on my teergrube code, although not  when I tried
to reproduce it by sending a spam myself over telnet. Mmhh...

> Haven't tried the teergrubeing yet :)

Well, it works, except for the fact that I use printf to output the SMTP
response, and that  if I'm inside an SSL connection,  I output cleartext
and break the SSL connection :-)

Marc
-- 
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