Coding Is Hard

Much email joy today.

We scan every incoming email for viruses using McAfee. It takes some magic to call the McAfee scanner on a Unix system through Amavis, but it does seem to work most of the time.

It was not working today, however. Starting with the new virus definitions from the 14th, McAfee began bombing out on every email coming in. This let viruses through (that did not otherwise get flagged as spam), but more importantly it began filling up the Amavis temp directory. The subdirectory limit was hit this morning and broke everything -- at which point I discovered that McAfee wasn't working.

Unfortunately, this discovery came just as we were doing planned security and maintenance upgrades to a couple of the main servers. One of the upgrades killed some bug workarounds I had made for RHEL's autofs, and a reboot of another server broke nfs due to some bad documentation. (A script of mine had been forked by another admin. He hadn't updated the documentation, and still other admins were running the BSD rather than the RHEL version. Which broke a lot of things come reboot time, but not enough for us to notice right away.)

Fixing all that took an hour or so, and then it was back to coming up with a drop-in virus scanning solution. Clam AV seemed like the thing to do, and was merrily cranking away by the time I left this afternoon.