MD-MX-CTRL(8)						      System Manager's Manual						     MD-MX-CTRL(8)

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-multi-
	      plexor.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 min-
	      utes 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 min-
	      utes.

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

	      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 num-
	      ber 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.

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 com-
       mands 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 David F. 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)

4th Berkeley Distribution					  8 February 2005						     MD-MX-CTRL(8)