[Gllug] spamassassin help!

[lesleyb at herlug.org.uk]

On Sat, Nov 01, 2008 at 01:56:34PM +0000, Adrian McMenamin wrote:
> Everytime I upgrade my Ubuntu server I have spamassassin problems
> because a long time ago (about three years ago) I put some subtle kink
> in the setup and the maintainers keep changing the way the thing works
> in subtle ways also.
> 
> I've been wrestling with the latest now for a couple of days and I have
> got to the point where everything except it appears to have lost track
> of the existing Baysian data - which is stored under the user account
> adrmail
> 
> Nov  1 13:44:55 dragoneye spamd[26243]: spamd: connection from
> newgolddream.info [127.0.0.1] at port 37696 
> Nov  1 13:44:55 dragoneye spamd[26243]: spamd: setuid to root succeeded 
> Nov  1 13:44:55 dragoneye spamd[26243]: spamd: still running as root:
> user not specified with -u, not found, or set to root, falling back to
> nobody 
> Nov  1 13:44:55 dragoneye spamd[26243]: spamd: processing message
> <1225547088.5597.3.camel at zhukov> for root:65534 
> Nov  1 13:45:04 dragoneye spamd[26243]: pyzor: check failed: internal
> error 
> Nov  1 13:45:10 dragoneye spamd[26243]: auto-whitelist: open of
> auto-whitelist file failed: locker: safe_lock: cannot create tmp
> lockfile /nonexistent/.spamassassin/auto-whitelist.lock.dragoneye.26243
> for /nonexistent/.spamassassin/auto-whitelist.lock: No such file or
> directory 
> 
> etc
> 
> Outgoing mails are tun through Bayesian filters though. Hmmm.
> 
> I know I can plug away at this for a day or two and I can fix it, but
> any clues as to what I should be looking for?
> 
> This is what I have OPTIONS in /etc/default/spamassassin set to:
> 
> OPTIONS="--create-prefs --max-children 5 --helper-home-dir"
> 
> and this is from /etc/default/spamass-milter
> 
> OPTIONS="-u nobody"

http://spamassassin.apache.org/
The front page of the wiki there has a link to the mailing lists, the
FAQ and documentation sources.

Not sure about Ubuntu but I feel you certainly shouldn't be losing your
local config every upgrade.  I would suspect therefore that you
might be putting that local config in an area that is overwritten every
upgrade and that there is in fact a safer place to put local configs.
That is at least the way Debian handles such things.

perldoc Mail::SpamAssassin::Conf says 

"SpamAssassin is configured using traditional UNIX-style configuration
files, loaded from the "/usr/share/spamassassin" and "/etc/spamassassin"
directories."

and my Debian isntall there is a file local.cnf in /etc/spamassassin.

Also, it is worth taking regular backups of certain parts of your 
server, including perhaps at least /var/log, /var/www and /etc if not 
also /usr/local .

Regards

Lesley
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