[Mimedefang] McAfee uvscan workaround (was: uvscan exceedingly slow)

[Nels Lindquist]

On 12 Sep 2003 at 13:27, Ole Holm Nielsen wrote:

> Examining further the output of "strace uvscan ...", it was obvious
> that two 5-6 second delays occur when uvscan apparently tries to
> open the /dev/hda device.  Since our server runs with SCSI disks,
> it turned out that /dev/hda is a CD-ROM drive (with no CD in it).
> The strace pointed to a problem by outputting at the time of delays:
> open("/dev/hda", O_RDONLY)              = -1 ERRNO_123 (No medium found)
> 
> It dawned upon me that I should try to put a CD in the drive and mount it.
> Voila !  The 13-second overhead in running uvscan is now down to 0.015 seconds !
> This workaround will keep me happy as long as I remember to leave a
> CD mounted in the CD drive :-)  Perhaps this problem will be generic
> to all systems with SCSI-disks ?  I've opened a support case with McAfee
> support asking for a (hopefully) better solution.

I seem to recall this problem occurring a *long* time ago, and it 
turned out that MIMEDefang needed to add --noboot to the commandline 
to prevent uvscan from trying to scan the boot sector, because it 
would do so for *every single filesystem.*

MIMEDefang *does* use that option now, so have the options perhaps 
changed in newer versions of uvscan?

----
Nels Lindquist <*>
Information Systems Manager
Morningstar Air Express Inc.