[CentOS] OOM condition with file-4.17-9.0.1.el5

[Phil Schaffner]

On Fri, 2008-05-16 at 14:30 +0200, John wrote:
> Hello all,
> 
> We just encountered several serious Out of Memory Problems caused by the 
> file 4.17-9.0.1.EL5 utility on our mail Gateway. CentOS 5.1 kept it self 
> alive by killing it parent process Amavisd-new. Manually restarting 
> Amavisd-new and flushing the mail queue caused same problem. Disabling file 
> for the moment, caused Amavisd-new to fail, and also defer all mail.
> 
> My quick and dirty solution was the download the Fedora Core 9's 
> file.4.23-5.src.rpm. and rebuild it on CentOS 5 After upgrading file, 
> restarting Amavisd-new and flushing the Postfix queue, all mail was 
> delivered without problems.
> 
> Because our mail system went down, it didn't have the time to trace the 
> message causing the problem.
> 
> But I want to share here that the Redhat / CentOS EL5 file utility has 
> problems and provide a quick workaround for the problem.

Can't find a bug report on this for either CentOS-5 or upstream.

Phil