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

• grepping of virus names fails with H+BEDV Antivir (amavis-perl: fixed in CVS/fixed with amavisd-snapshot-20010714)
• grepping of virus names fails with Computer Associates InoculateIT (amavis-perl: fixed in CVS/fixed with amavisd-snapshot-20010714)
• amavisd snapshot-20010407 has a bug with handling childs which may block the parent (fixed with amavisd-snapshot-20010714)
• 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 does not compile on FreeBSD. Please apply this patch from CVS (fixed with amavisd-snapshot-20010714)
• (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.
• If you can not find Archive::Zip on CPAN please grab it from here
• The Perl module UUlib, version 0.2 is broken. Either use 0.111 instead or use the patch for UUlib in our contrib directory.
• The Perl module Compress-Zlib (1.13) has a generic bug, which causes amais-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.
• make check for amavisd does NOT work. Please read tests/README

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

• There's a bug within libmilter of sendmail 8.12.x. See this page for details and the patch which solves the issue
• (amavisd only) 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 $h") and not mail (although only mail is mentioned in the README.sendmail file, but that's only an example!).
• (amavisd only) The socket for the mailer milter-amavis is /var/amavis/amavis-milter.sock, therefore it's
  Xmilter-amavis, S=local:/var/amavis/amavis-milter.sock, T=S:10m;R:10m;E:10m
  (README.milter is wrong here, but the m4 command mentioned in README.milter is correct)
• (amavis-perl only) We suggest to use the socket name /var/amavis/amavis-milter.sock (and not /var/amavis/amavis.sock as mentioned in README.milter) to be consistent with amavisd and to avoid confusion :-)
• amavis-milter runs as root. Is this really needed? Well, it seems not. amavis-milter seems to work quite well if it's running i.e. as user amavis (please see the "Running amavis-milter as non-root user" thread for details)
• (amavisd with sendmail relay config) If the sender is null, (the client) amavis will hang. To avoid this, please use
  A=amavis <$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-perl seems not to work due to problems with setuid perl scripts. Further investigation needed (anyone?) (you may have a look at this 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 softlimit is too low. Please increase it to at least 6-8 MB.

postfix

• If you encounter any problems with X400 addresses, please add "flags=q" option to the vscan transport in main.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.

Please send questions, feedback and so on to our amavis-user mailing list.

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