[Mimedefang] MD unable to create spool directories

Clayton, Nik [IT] nik.clayton at citigroup.com
Tue Feb 25 08:11:01 EST 2003


> Caveat -- still using 2.16, until I find the time to package 
> and test a more recent version.  So this issue may have gone away by 
> now, although by reading the code and the changelogs I don't see how.

It hasn't.  I've just deployed 2.30, and we're still seeing the problem.
However, the fixes for some of the logging info in 2.30 have, I think,
pinpointed the problem.

We now see warnings in the logs that look like this:

    fdopen failed on /var/spool/MIMEDefang/mdefang-3E5B606F-0/INPUTMSG:
Error 0

This also happens on the COMMANDS and HEADERS files, and sometimes the
error string is 'File exists' instead of 'Error 0'.

Checking the fdopen(3C) man page

 
http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=fdopen&apropos=0&sektion=0&manpath=
SunOS+5.8&format=html

it says:

[...]

    RETURN VALUES
       Upon  successful completion, fdopen() returns a pointer to
       a stream. Otherwise, a null pointer is returned and  errno
       is set to indicate the error.

       The  fdopen() function may fail and not set errno if there
       are no free stdio streams.

[...]

    USAGE
       The number of streams that a process can have open at  one
       time  is  STREAM_MAX. If defined, it has the same value as
       FOPEN_MAX.

A grovel through /usr/include/stdio.h shows

    #define _NFILE 	20
    #define FOPEN_MAX 	_NFILE

and no definition for STREAM_MAX.

This is documented as a per-process limit, rather than a per-thread limit,
so this would seem to put a severe cap on the number of messages that
mimedefang can process concurrently.

N
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