[BlueOnyx:06656] Re: vacation.pl oddities

[Roy Urick]

Thanks Ken, but that wont quite help. 

Quite often you cant kill the process because it gets locked up so badly.
The only way to kill the process in that case is an "init 6". I've so far
had to reboot our server 4x in as many hours today to fix the problem after
trying repeatedly to kill the process various ways... by PID causes it to
spawn a new one instantly.  Killing by the user, or killall by process name
simply doesn't do a thing. Neither errors that nothing was killed, it just
is ineffective. 

The only reliable way to stop it is to prevent it from running in the first
place. But I just don't want to disable it in a way that breaks something
else. (other than maybe adding log file entries)


-----Original Message-----
From: blueonyx-bounces at blueonyx.it [mailto:blueonyx-bounces at blueonyx.it] On
Behalf Of Ken - Precision Web Hosting, Inc
Sent: Friday, March 11, 2011 12:20 PM
To: BlueOnyx General Mailing List
Subject: [BlueOnyx:06654] Re: vacation.pl oddities


----- Original Message ----- 
From: Roy Urick
To: blueonyx at blueonyx.it
Sent: Friday, March 11, 2011 8:26 AM
Subject: [BlueOnyx:06653] vacation.pl oddities


This is a little bit OT, but I know a lot of you are familiar with BQ as 
well.

We are currently running a BQ server, and are in the process of migrating 
away to a BlueOnyx server. We aren't quite ready to pull the trigger on the 
migration due to hardware that is still in transit, but we have a major 
issue with our old box that needs desperate attention in the interim.

We have a handful of users that when they activate the vacation reply, it 
starts vacation.pl and pegs out the CPU for each message inbound with no 
apparent output. Eventually the user account will have multiple instances of

vacation.pl running to the point the CPU is maxed at 100%, sendmail crashes,

the GUI locks, etc. Other users don't seem to have any problems with it and 
it runs fine.

I've seen google results where gurus like Gerald Waugh and others have 
somewhat reproduced the problem but cant find a solution, I've had others 
look at our box and come to the same (lack of) conclusion.

Even though the user's account  who caused the last problem has been reset 
to turn off the script it continues to flare up intermittently. It appears 
that Its time to disable it for the short term so it cant possibly run.

What is the best (most stable and reliable) way to disable vacation.pl so it

cant possibly run? Rename it so it cant be found by other scripts that call 
it? Add something to the first line to make it exit immediately if it does 
get called?
>>


Roy

I've seen that on sites / users that are over quota.

You could also set up a cron to kill the vaction.pl

Something like
*/2   *   *  *  *  killall -9 vacation.pl

----
Ken M
Precision Web Hosting, Inc.
http://www.precisionweb.net



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