[wplug-bsd] Periodic -- phantom email -- SOLVED (ish)

[Brandon Kuczenski]

On Sun, 9 Jan 2005, Brandon Kuczenski wrote:

>> Brandon Kuczenski <brandon at 301south.net> wrote:
>> 
>>> About a month ago I added a new script to my /etc/periodic/security
>>> directory.  The script looks through the security log for notations
>>> regarding people updating their IMAP passwords, and it's nothing special.
>>> It works fine.
>>

By disabling and individually re-enabling periodic scripts, I isolated the 
broken script as 150.clean_hoststat -- when that script is disabled, 
periodic no longer generates random broken emails.

Which begs the question: what does that script do?  A perusal reveals that 
it only runs the command 'purgestat', which exists on my system at 
/usr/sbin/purgestat but has no man page.  The only mention I can find is 
in the sendmail(8) page, where it's mentioned: "If invoked as purgestat, 
sendmail will purge expired entries from the persistent host status 
database."

This makes circumstantial sense, since the problem coincided with 
substantial modificaitons to my postfix configuration.  But what does 
purgestat do?

-Brandon