Today I finally investigated a long standing issue with my little server beastie: Whenever the load went up, I would get error messages stating ‘spamd[…]: bayes: cannot open bayes databases … R/W: lock failed: File exists’. Usually the problem was only temporary and I would get my e-mails anyway, sometimes I’d have to go into the mail queue and thaw the messages from there, so I never bothered to look into it until I got a flood of those messages yesterday when I ran a full backup of my already stressed out system.
Turns out the bayes database is at fault. Spamassassin is trying to expire old tokes in the database whenever it hits a certain limit and apparently my databases were corrupted to the point where the expiry wouldn’t work. As a result, SA kept trying and failed to expire the tokens and if it took too long, the other SA threads would have trouble with the still Bayes DB locks.
As there seemed to be no easy fix for this, I was forced to drop my Bayes databases for the affected users, hence the title of this post: I need some fresh spam to retrain my Bayes filter. The spam spewing scumbags among you will have my addresses in their database, so make my day! ;)