md-mx-ctrl - Control mimedefang-multiplexor

md-mx-ctrl [options] command

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

-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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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