Odd Messages showing up in /var/log/messages

Lowell Gilbert freebsd-questions-local at be-well.ilk.org
Sat May 21 07:25:12 PDT 2005


Jason Williams <jwilliams at courtesymortgage.com> writes:

> Hello everyone.
> 
> Just recently, some very odd messages started showing up in my
> /var/log/messages on a FreeBSD 4.9 MailGateway box.This box serves as
> our primary email scrubber, removing viruses and quarnatining spam. It
> has worked flawlessly for over a year. This messages started popping
> up just this week.
> 
> Here is a few snips:
> 
> May 20 08:22:27 mail jwilliams: Process did not exit cleanly, returned
> 255 with signal 0
> May 20 08:22:38 mail jwilliams: Process did not exit cleanly, returned
> 255 with signal 0
> May 20 08:23:44 mail jwilliams: Process did not exit cleanly, returned
> 255 with signal 0
> May 20 08:26:45 mail jwilliams: Process did not exit cleanly, returned
> 255 with signal 0
> May 20 08:31:50 mail jwilliams: Process did not exit cleanly, returned
> 9 with signal 0
> May 20 08:34:39 mail jwilliams: Process did not exit cleanly, returned
> 9 with signal 0
> May 20 08:35:01 mail jwilliams: Process did not exit cleanly, returned
> 255 with signal 0
> May 20 08:37:37 mail jwilliams: Process did not exit cleanly, returned
> 255 with signal 0
> 
> 
> Just to be sure, I ran chkrootkit as well as rootkithunter on the
> boxes, just to check. They both came back negative for any infections
> or foul play.
> 
> But, I am still concerned about these messages and would like to know
> what they are and what is causing them. It would make me feel better.
> 
> Anyone have any recommendations on where to start? I'm a little
> baffled at this moment.

Is this one machine or two?  You use the plural in one spot and it's a
little confusing, because getting the same symptoms in more than one
place simultaneously seems strange.

The first place I would look would be cron jobs; perhaps something is
trying to make some sort of report and failing consistently.  Also,
try to correlate those messages to entries in the log files of
whatever daemons you have related to mail handling.


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