There are plenty of times that you need to stop Qmail for maintainence purposes.

The qmailctl script generally does a good job of stopping qmail, but sometimes it does not quite shutdown all of the qmail processes.

[root@here]# qmailctl stop
Stopping qmail…
qmail-smtpd
qmail-send

[root@here]# qmailctl stat
/service/qmail-send: up (pid 32436) 358918 seconds, want down
/service/qmail-send/log: down 3 seconds, normally up
/service/qmail-smtpd: down 3 seconds, normally up
/service/qmail-smtpd/log: down 3 seconds, normally up
messages in queue: 142
messages in queue but not yet preprocessed: 0

As you can see from the output of qmailctl stat, the qmail-send program is still running. If you do a^[1]

ps waux | grep qmail | grep -v grep

you will often find output like

[root@here]# psq
root 55033 0.0 0.1 1196 480 ?? I Tue05PM 0:00.01 supervise qmail-send
qmails 55035 0.0 0.1 1340 760 ?? I Tue05PM 1:28.27 qmail-send
root 55036 0.0 0.1 1196 480 ?? I Tue05PM 0:00.01 supervise qmail-smtpd
qmaill 55040 0.0 0.1 1224 532 ?? I Tue05PM 0:29.48 multilog t s100000 n20 /var/log/qmail/qmail-send
root 55043 0.0 0.1 1216 500 ?? I Tue05PM 0:00.03 tcpserver -H -R -v -c100 0 110 qmail-popup
root 55048 0.0 0.1 1216 548 ?? I Tue05PM 0:00.02 qmail-lspawn ./Maildir
qmailr 55049 0.0 0.1 1284 684 ?? I Tue05PM 0:22.64 qmail-rspawn
qmailq 55050 0.0 0.1 1212 544 ?? I Tue05PM 0:04.69 qmail-clean
qmailr 83484 0.0 0.2 2432 1196 ?? I 2:38AM 0:00.00 qmail-remote yahoo.com webmaster@here.com there@yahoo.com
qmailr 83498 0.0 0.2 2432 1196 ?? I 2:38AM 0:00.01 qmail-remote hotmail.com webmaster@here.com you@yahoo.com

If you then run qmailctl start, you will often have the situation with qmail-send showing up as running for 1 second while the other qmail processes are up for much longer. Basically a second qmail-send is trying to start and is dying after a second. The first instance of qmail-send is still running and needs to be stopped.

The output often contains a mixture of qmail-send, qmail-remote, qmail-clean and others depending on how your mail has been setup and what is in the process of being sent/received when you issue the qmailctl stop command.

At this point, we can wait a bit, to see if qmail-send eventually goes down or whether we will have to kill it explicitly. It is worth trying another qmailctl stop at this point. If qmailctl stat shows qmail-send is still up, which is often the case, it is probably time to kill qmail-send directly.

I usually do a kill -9 qmail-send. Then follow it with psq to see what is still running. Often I have to run a number of kills and killalls, such as killall qmail-remote. We’re not really shutting down qmail very cleanly, but sometimes, especially when you’re in a hurry it makes sense to kill things rather than wait for them to terminate.

Eventually only the supervise scripts should be running,

[root@work]#psq
root 561 0.0 0.0 1148 84 con- I Sat02AM 0:00.05 supervise qmail-send
root 563 0.0 0.0 1148 84 con- I Sat02AM 0:00.06 supervise qmail-smtpd

At this stage I usually call /usr/local/etc/rc.d/svscan.sh stop. The location of your actual svscan.sh script may be different from mine.

A psq shows nothing running. A sockstat -4 | grep 25 shows nothing listening on the smtp port. Now is the time to go in and do maintainance – such as recompile qmail, dequeue mail or repair the queue.

Once you’re done, starting qmail is as simple as /usr/local/etc/rc.d/svscan.sh start.

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[1] Actually I use this snippet quite a bit so to save time, I’ve copied it to a file called psq under /usr/local/bin

echo "ps waux | grep qmail | grep -v grep" > /usr/local/bin/psq

so that simply typing psq gives me a list of all the running qmail processes.

To get awstats to work with qmail log files I use this little script from Bob Hutchinson called qlogs4awstats.

Download the file and edit the lines below to reflect your local paths. Most likely only the third line below
will need to be edited, to reflect where you have installed awstats.

chdir(“/var/log/qmail/qmail-send”);

my $taiprog = “/usr/local/bin/tai64nlocal”;

my $mailconvprog = “/usr/local/www/awstats/tools/maillogconvert.pl standard”;

Once edited move it to /usr/local/bin and chmod it so that it is executable.

Next copy awstats.model.conf to awstats.mail.conf or whatever you want to call your conf file.
You will have to edit your awstats.mail.conf in the following places. Note that in the first line there is a space after the pipe character | .

LogFile="/usr/local/bin/qlogs4awstats 3600 | "

LogType=M

LogFormat="%time2 %email %email_r %host %host_r %method %url %code %bytesd"

HostAliases="localhost 127.0.0.1 @locals"

LevelForBrowsersDetection=0 # 0 disables Browsers detection.

LevelForOSDetection=0 # 0 disables OS detection.

LevelForRefererAnalyze=0 # 0 disables Origin detection.

LevelForRobotsDetection=0 # 0 disables Robots detection.

LevelForSearchEnginesDetection=0 # 0 disables Search engines detection.

LevelForKeywordsDetection=0 # 0 disables Keyphrases/Keywords detection.

LevelForFileTypesDetection=0 # 0 disables File types detection.

ShowSummary=HB

ShowMonthStats=HB

ShowDaysOfMonthStats=HB

ShowDaysOfWeekStats=HB

ShowHoursStats=HB

ShowDomainsStats=0

ShowHostsStats=HBL

ShowRobotsStats=0

ShowEMailSenders=HBML

ShowEMailReceivers=HBML

ShowSessionsStats=0

ShowPagesStats=0

ShowFileTypesStats=0

ShowOSStats=0

ShowBrowsersStats=0

ShowOriginStats=0

ShowKeyphrasesStats=0

ShowKeywordsStats=0

ShowMiscStats=0

ShowHTTPErrorsStats=0

ShowSMTPErrorsStats=1

You can download my sample awstats.mail.conf with the above changes from here .