Known bugs / FAQ for amavis-perl & amavisd

How to report a problem ...

If you encounter any (installation) problems, please

1. Re-read the documentation carefully
2. Check the AMaViS FAQ for amavis-perl/amavisd (this page!)
3. Check the amavis-user ML archive

If there is still no solution to your problem, your problem report should provide

• version of amavis
• version of MTA
• MTA config details
• log file evidence (MTA log / amavis log)
• other useful information, depending on the nature of the problem (OS, AV software, configure output etc.)

Please read the amavis-user ML guidelines, too!

CVS

• For browsing through the source code please direct your browser to http://cvsweb.amavis.org/
• General instructions for checking out the sources can be found at the SF CVS instructions page. If you want to check out the amavisd branch please use co -r amavisd amavis. The CVS Book is worth reading!

General issues

NOTE: All entries related to amavisd-snapshot-20010714 have been removed! Please use amavisd-snapshot-20020300 or newer!

• a lot of lha versions are totally broken, please grab the latest one from here. Please do not use any LHA version 1.15 (or even 2.x). Please use the latest of the 1.14 series. Please keep in mind, a broken LHA version will cause problems with exe files, too, as an exe file can be a self-extracting LHA-archive. Therefore, it's really important your LHA is fully functional!
• (amavisd only) On some systems, notably Solaris, /usr/include/sys/socket.h:SOMAXCONN is awfully small. If the mail logs show a lot of deferrals ("failed to connect()"), you may need to replace SOMAXCONN in amavisd with a higher value; but you still should remain within the limits set by the OS (I'm not terribly sure, but I think on Solaris the max values are: ndd /dev/tcp tcp_conn_req_max_q and tcp_conn_req_max_q0). HP-UX may be another candidate. DU/Tru64, Irix, Linux, the *BSDs should be OK.
• Archive-Zip release 1.05 is available from CPAN.
• Always use the latest version of the Convert-UUlib perl module. As of writing, the current version is 0.31, and older versions are known to have serious bugs (buffer overflows etc.).
• The Perl module Compress-Zlib (1.13) has a generic bug, which causes amavis-perl/amavisd to core dump on .zip files, esp (only?) on FreeBSD systems. Please apply the patch from contrib and read this mail. Alternatively, update to version 1.14 or newer.
• If you're missing a virus scanner for OpenBSD please read the following thread via groupgs.google.com
• If you're using Trend Micro FileScanner this posting from Frank Hauptle should be worth reading for you
• NAI uvscan (still) seems to be libc5-based. If you're running a glibc2 distro, it may lack of the libstdc++.so.2.8 lib. On a RedHat system, please install the compat-libstdc++ package, on a SuSE system, please install the compat package.
• Computer Associates released a new Linux version of the InoculateIT 6.0 product, which is not available for public download. In this version the command line utility is called inocmd32 (the ftp-version I used to integrate it into AMAViS is called inocucmd). Moreover, a problem running this version as non-root was reported to us. As I do not own a trial-/eval-version (yet), I can not have a closer look at this issue.
• Since AntiVir 6.12 (H+BEDV) you need a license key! Otherwise antivir will always return 214 ("no valid license key") and you'll get "Virus scanner failure: /usr/bin/antivir (error code : 214)" for every mail in your logs.
• make check for amavisd does NOT work fully. Please read tests/README
• If configure fails with "syntax error near unexpected token `ACX_PTHREAD('", please grab the acx_pthread.m4 file and save it as acinclude.m4 in the top-level source directory of AMaViS (i.e. /usr/local/src/amavis-0.3.12pre/acinclude.m4). Then call ./reconf in the top-lovel source directory of AMaViS
• If you are using sophie, the maximum number of concurrent scans limit may need to be increased on a busy mail server.

MTA specific-issues

NOTE: amavisd has to run under the choosen user id (i.e. amavis or vscan), not as root. So, if you get an error message such as "connection refused", amavisd is started incorrectly. You may use "su - userid -c "/usr/sbin/amavisd >/dev/null 2>&1", for SuSE Linux "startproc -u userid /usr/sbin/amavisd" or for RedHat Linux "daemon --user userid /usr/sbin/amavisd"

exim

• If the sender is null, (the client) amavis will hang. To avoid this, please use for amavisd:
  command = "/usr/sbin/amavis <${sender_address}> ${pipe_addresses}"
  For amavis-perl please use:
  command = "/usr/sbin/amavis -f <${sender_address}> -d ${pipe_addresses}"
  Mind the brackets around ${sender} (see amavis-ML archive, too). Should be fixed with amavisd-snapshot-20010714

sendmail

MILTER Interface
• There's a bug within libmilter of eary versions of sendmail 8.12.x. Please ensure you upgrade to the latest version (8.12.6 at time of writing)
• If ./configure complains about "checking for smfi_main in -lmilter... no
  configure: error: milter requested but not found" although all required libs and header files are installed, your sendmail version has LDAP-support compiled in. So, simply use LDFLAGS="-lldap" ./configure --your switches
• amavisd-snapshot-20020531 The milter interface is broken, apply the patch and change.
• (amavisd-snapshot-20020220 and earlier) The socket for the mailer milter-amavis is /var/amavis/amavis-milter.sock, therefore it's
  Xmilter-amavis, S=local:/var/amavis/amavis-milter.sock, T=S:10m;R:10m;E:10m
  (README.milter is wrong here, but the m4 command mentioned in README.milter is correct)
• (amavis-perl only) We suggest to use the socket name /var/amavis/amavis-milter.sock (and not /var/amavis/amavis.sock as mentioned in README.milter) to be consistent with amavisd and to avoid confusion :-)
• amavis-milter runs as root. Is this really needed? Well, it seems not. amavis-milter seems to work quite well if it's running i.e. as user amavis (please see the "Running amavis-milter as non-root user" thread for details)

NON-MILTER interface
• The Mlocal setup causes troubles for some people. Therefore two general hints. Do not use "f" or "r" in the F= flags settings. If your local delivery agent is procmail, please use procmail with all procmail flags as in the original Mlocal entry (except "-a $h") and not mail (although only mail is mentioned in the README.sendmail file, but that's only an example!).
• (amavisd with sendmail relay config) If the sender is null, (the client) amavis will hang. To avoid this, please use
  A=amavis <$f> $u in the Mamavis mailer. (I'm afraid there's no workaround in the milter case, which most likely suffers from this problem, too) Should be fixed with amavisd-snapshot-20010714

qmail

• On some systems amavis seems not to work due to problems with setui d perl scripts. Further investigation needed (anyone?) (you may have a look at t his posting from Theodor Milkov). Klaus Ripke provided another suid-wrapper which can be used to avoid multiple scans, too.
• If you get some weird errors, i.e. "error while loading shared libraries libc.so.6: cannot load shared object file: Cannot allocate memory", then your s oftlimit is too low. Please increase it to at least 6-8 MB.
• The italian qmail-HowTo describes the qmail+amavis-perl setup

postfix

• If you encounter any problems with X400 addresses, please add "flags=q" option to the vscan transport in master.cf, i.e.
  vscan unix - n n - 40 pipe flags=q user=amavis argv=/usr/sbin/amavis ${sender} ${recipient}
  Please keep in mind you'll need a recent postfix version (20010610 or better). Please see the Odd X400 address syntax and AMaViS thread.

Additions/corrections to/of FAQ entries should be send to faq-submit at amavis dot org. Question should be send only to the amavis-user mailing list.

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