Geeky Ramblings

Yesterday I found that the RPM database on my Fedora Core 6 linux system’s were corrupted and that the regularly running update process was failing (without telling me, unfortunately).

After fixing the RPM database problem (rm -f /var/lib/rpm/__db.* && rpm -vv —rebuilddb) and running the update (yum update), I found that SpamAssassin’s update process wasn’t working anymore.

root@rivendell ~]# sa-update
Use of uninitialized value in concatenation (.) or string at /usr/lib/perl5/5.8.8/i386-linux-thread-multi/Scalar/Util.pm line 30.

Apparently one of the updates that were applied in the mass update caused SpamAssassin to break.

The same problem occurred when I tried to test the SpamAssassin rules.

root@rivendell ~]# spamassassin —lint
Use of uninitialized value in concatenation (.) or string at /usr/lib/perl5/5.8.8/i386-linux-thread-multi/Scalar/Util.pm line 30.

A bit of research turned up this link.

Luckily the fix was fairly easy … just update the Scalar-List-Utils CPAN package …

perl -MCPAN -e 'install "G/GB/GBARR/Scalar-List-Utils-1.18.tar.gz"

… and everything worked fine again.

Recently I noticed that there’s a lot of temporary files in the /tmp directory on my mail server … all the files have spamassassin in the file name. I figured that in some cases, SpamAssassin (or programs it calls) isn’t cleaning up properly.

I whipped up this script that will clean up any spamassassin files & directories that are older than a set number of minutes (60 in my case)…

#!/bin/sh

AGE=60

if [ "$1" == "--test" ]
then
        CMD="-exec echo"
        echo "$0: test mode"
else
        CMD="-exec"
fi

/usr/bin/find /tmp \
        -mmin +$AGE \
        -name spamassassin.ocr* \
        $CMD /bin/rm -f '{}' \;

/usr/bin/find /tmp \
        -maxdepth 1 \
        -mmin +$AGE \
        -type d \
        -name .spamassassin\* \
        $CMD /bin/rm -rf '{}' \;

If you run the script with a parameter of ‘–test’, it will just show the commands it would have executed.

I put the script in /etc/cron.hourly directory so it gets executed every hour.