Ubuntu Manpage: md-mx-ctrl - Control mimedefang-multiplexor

Provided by: mimedefang_2.78-1ubuntu1.1_amd64

NAME

       md-mx-ctrl - Control mimedefang-multiplexor

SYNOPSIS

       md-mx-ctrl [options] command

DESCRIPTION

       md-mx-ctrl is a command-line tool for communicating with mimedefang-multiplexor(8).

OPTIONS

       -h     Displays usage information.

       -s path
              Specifies  the  path  to  the  mimedefang-multiplexor  socket.   If  not specified,
              defaults to /var/spool/MIMEDefang/mimedefang-multiplexor.sock.

       -i     This flag causes md-mx-ctrl to sit in a loop, reading commands  on  standard  input
              and  printing  results  to standard output.  It is intended for use by a monitoring
              program such as watch-mimedefang.

COMMANDS

The following commands are available:

status Prints the status of all slave Perl processes in human-readable format.

rawstatus
Prints the status of all slave Perl processes in a format easy to parse by
computer. The result is a single line with six words on it. The words are
separated by a single space character.

Each character in the first word corresponds to a slave, and is "I" for an idle
slave, "B" for a busy slave, "S" for a slave which is not running, and "K" for a
slave which has been killed, but has not yet exited. A slave is "idle" if there is
a running Perl process waiting to do work. "Busy" means the Perl process is
currently filtering a message. "S" means there is no associated Perl process with
the slave, but one can be started if the load warrants. Finally, "K" means the
slave Perl process has been killed, but has yet to terminate.

The second word is the total number of messages processed since the multiplexor
started up. The third word is the total number of slaves which have been activated
since the multiplexor started up. (That is, it's a count of the number of times
the multiplexor has forked and exec'd the Perl filter.)

The fourth word is the size of the queue for request queuing, and the fifth word is
the actual number of requests in the queue. The sixth word is the number of
seconds elapsed since the multiplexor was started.

barstatus
Prints the status of busy slaves and queued requests in a nice "bar chart" format.
This lets you keep an eye on things with a script like this:

while true ; do
md-mx-ctrl barstatus
sleep 1
done

histo Prints a histogram showing the number of slaves that were busy each time a request
was processed. A single line is printed for the numbers from 1 up to the maximum
number of slaves. Each line contains the count of busy slaves (1, 2, 3 up to
MX_MAXIMUM), a space, and the number of times that many slaves were busy when a
request was processed.

load Prints a table showing "load averages" for the last 10 seconds, 1 minute, 5 minutes
and 10 minutes.

Each row in the table corresponds to a time interval, displayed in the first
column. The remaining columns in the table are:

Msgs: The number of messages scanned within the row's time interval.

Msgs/Sec: The average number of messages scanned per second within the row's time
interval.

Avg Busy Slaves: The average number of busy slaves whenever a message was scanned.
(If you are processing any mail at all, this number will be at least 1, because
there is always 1 busy slave when a message is scanned.)

If you have the watch(1) command on your system, you can keep an eye on the load
with this command:

watch -n 10 md-mx-ctrl load

If you do not have watch, the following shell script is a less fancy equivalent:

#!/bin/sh
while true; do
clear
date
md-mx-ctrl load
sleep 10
done

rawload

Prints the load averages in computer-readable format. The format consists of
twenty-nine space-separated numbers:

The first four are integers representing the number of messages scanned in the last
10 seconds, 1 minute, 5 minutes and 10 minutes.

The second four are floating-point numbers representing the average number of busy
slaves in the last 10 seconds, 1 minute, 5 minutes and 10 minutes.

The third four are floating-point numbers representing the average time per scan in
milliseconds over the last 10 seconds, 1 minute, 5 minutes and 10 minutes.

The fourth four are the number of slave activations (new slaves started) over the
last 10 seconds, 1 minute, 5 minutes and 10 minutes.

The fifth four are the number of slaves reaped (slaves that have exited) over the
last 10 seconds, 1 minute, 5 minutes and 10 minutes.

The sixth four are the number of busy, idle, stopped and killed slaves.

The seventh four are the number of messages processed, the number of slave
activations, the size of the request queue, and the number of requests actually on
the queue.

The final number is the number of seconds since the multiplexor was started.

load-relayok
Similar to load, but shows timings for filter_relay calls.

load-senderok
Similar to load, but shows timings for filter_sender calls.

load-recipok
Similar to load, but shows timings for filter_recipient calls.

rawload-relayok
Similar to rawload, but shows timings for filter_relay calls. Note that the slave
activation and reap statistics are present, but always 0. They are only valid in a
rawload command.

rawload-senderok
Similar to rawload, but shows timings for filter_sender calls. Note that the slave
activation and reap statistics are present, but always 0. They are only valid in a
rawload command.

rawload-recipok
Similar to rawload, but shows timings for filter_recipient calls. Note that the
slave activation and reap statistics are present, but always 0. They are only
valid in a rawload command.

load1 nsecs
The load1 command displays the load for various commands over the last nsecs
seconds, where nsecs is an integer from 10 to 600. The load1 command combines the
output of load, load-relayok, load-senderokf and load-recipok into one display.

You might use the command like this:

watch -n 10 md-mx-ctrl load1 60

rawload1 nsecs
Returns the load1 data in human-readable format. The result is a line containing
twenty-six space-separated numbers:

The first three numbers are the number of scans performed in the last nsecs
seconds, the average number of busy slaves when a scan was initiated and the
average number of milliseconds per scan.

The second three are the same measurements for filter_relay calls.

The third three are the same measurements for filter_sender calls.

The fourth three are the same measurements for filter_relay calls.

The thirteenth through sixteenth numbers are the number of busy, idle, stopped and
killed slaves, respectively.

The seventeenth number is the number of scans since mimedefang-multiplexor was
started.

The eighteenth number is the number of times a new slave has been activated since
program startup.

The nineteenth number is the size of the request queue and the twentieth number is
the actual number of queued requests.

The twenty-first number is the time since program startup and the twenty-second
number is a copy of nsecs for convenience.

The twenty-third through twenty-sixth numbers are the number of slaves currently
executing a scan, relayok, senderok and recipok command respectively.

slaves Displays a list of slaves and their process IDs. Each line of output consists of a
slave number, a status (I, B, K, or S), and for idle or busy slaves, the process-ID
of the slave. For busy slaves, the line may contain additional information about
what the slave is doing.

busyslaves
Similar to slaves, but only outputs a line for each busy slave.

slaveinfo n
Displays information about slave number n.

reread Forces mimedefang-multiplexor to kill all idle slaves, and terminate and restart
busy slaves when they become idle. This forces a reread of filter rules.

msgs Prints the total number of messages scanned since the multiplexor started.

ADDITIONAL COMMANDS

       You  can  supply  any  other command and arguments to md-mx-ctrl.  It percent-encodes each
       command-line argument, glues the encoded arguments together with a  single  space  between
       each,  and  sends  the  result  to  the multiplexor as a command.  This allows you to send
       arbitrary commands to your  Perl  slaves.   See  the  section  "EXTENDING  MIMEDEFANG"  in
       mimedefang-filter(5) for additional details.

PERMISSIONS

       md-mx-ctrl  uses  the multiplexor's socket; therefore, it probably needs to be run as root
       or the same user as mimedefang-multiplexor.

AUTHOR

       md-mx-ctrl was written by Dianne Skoll <dfs@roaringpenguin.com>.  The mimedefang home page
       is http://www.mimedefang.org/.