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/.
SEE ALSO
mimedefang.pl(8), mimedefang-filter(5), mimedefang(8), mimedefang-protocol(7), watch-mimedefang(8)