From CyberWurx Customer Wiki
Aug 24, 2007
From billing@cpanel.net
Subject cPanel Advisory: Spamassassin 100% cpu usage.
Body NOC:
You are receiving this communication because you are listed as the
tech contact for Cyber Wurx, LLC.
Dear cPanel Partner,
There have been numerous reports recently regarding excessive CPU
utilization by spamd. This is occurring as a result of a bug in the
berkelydb implementation used by SpamAssassin, which causes spamd children
to enter an infinite loop when attempting to open a temporary file in the
user's ~./.spamassassin directory.
You can determine whether or not this is the case by executing a trace
against the spamd process in question, and monitoring the trace for
repeated calls to open() a file in ~/.spamassassin/__db.[DB_NAME].
For example, you can launch a trace on the affected process with the
following command:
strace -vvFf -s 4096 -e trace=file -p [PID]
A trace on an affected server would repeated output something similar to
the following:
open("/home/user/.spamassassin/__db.bayes_toks.new",
O_RDWR|O_CREAT|O_EXCL|O_LARGEFILE, 0600) = -1 EEXIST (File exists)
open("/home/user/.spamassassin/__db.bayes_toks.new",
O_RDWR|O_CREAT|O_EXCL|O_LARGEFILE, 0600) = -1 EEXIST (File exists)
open("/home/user/.spamassassin/__db.bayes_toks.new",
O_RDWR|O_CREAT|O_EXCL|O_LARGEFILE, 0600) = -1 EEXIST (File exists)
open("/home/user/.spamassassin/__db.bayes_toks.new",
O_RDWR|O_CREAT|O_EXCL|O_LARGEFILE, 0600) = -1 EEXIST (File exists)
We have devised a work around for SpamAssassin, which can be applied by
taking the following steps:
killall -TERM spamd # ensure all hung spamd processes are terminated
killall -9 spamd # ensure all hung spamd processes are terminated
Visit the following WHM URL:
https://__your_sever_ip_here__:2087/scripts2/autofixer
Enter spamd_dbm_fix into the input field, and click 'Submit'
Once the patch has been applied, the spamd loads should subside. If the
problem persists after applying the patch, please let our support team
know, and they will investigate any outstanding issues.
We have notified the SpamAssassin developers of this issue, and expect
that this will be resolved in versions 3.2.4 and greater.
---------------------
Aug 17, 2007
From billing@cpanel.net
Subject Spamassassin & perl 5.8.8
Body NOC:
You are receiving this communication because you are listed as the
tech contact for Cyber Wurx, LLC.
Dear cPanel Partner,
There have been reported issues recently with SpamAssassin in regards to:
1. Load Issues
2. Spamd locking
3. Not catching all spam e-mail
To resolve these issues, please upgrade Perl to version 5.8.8 which is
recommended for using cPanel 11.
You can ensure that each installed module gets carried over to
the updated Perl build with the use of the “autobundle” CPAN feature.
You can create a bundle of the currently installed modules
by executing the following while logged in via SSH as root:
perl -MCPAN -e 'autobundle'
Once completed, you should see the following output before getting
returned to the shell:
'Wrote bundle file /home/.cpan/Bundle/Snapshot_2007_08_16_00.pm'
Once you've made note of this file name, you can proceed with the update.
On linux based systems, you should be able to update Perl using
the installer provided at layer1.cpanel.net:
cd /root
wget http://layer1.cpanel.net/perl588installer.tar.gz
tar -zxf perl588installer.tar.gz
cd perl588installer
./install
On FreeBSD based systems, you will need to install Perl from ports.
This will take a few minutes, so take a coffee break and check
the status when you return. Once the update has completed, you
can install all previously installed modules from the CPAN bundle
by executing the following (with the bundle name adjusted to the
name of the bundle generated earlier):
perl -MCPAN -e 'install Bundle::Snapshot_2007_08_16_00'
This should install each of the modules present in the bundle,
assuming there are no issues during the installation (dependencies,
network, etc).
Once this has completed, execute the following to ensure that all modules
required by cPanel are installed, and restart cPanel:
/usr/local/cpanel/bin/checkperlmodules
/usr/local/cpanel/startup
For more details on the cPanel 11 updates, please refer to the release
notes at the following URL:
http://www.cpanel.net/products/cPanelandWHM/linux/cpanel11/releasenotes.pdf
As always, if you incur any complications during the updates, or have
any questions/concerns you would like us to address, contact our support
team by opening a support ticket, and we will gladly assist you!
Matt Carey
Technical Support Manager
cPanel
mattc@cpanel.net
