Fix (or at least part of one)
After opening a thread over at
atomiccorp.com I finally figured this out over there and thought I would post the information I found out here, as it may be helpful to someone in the future.
psa-spamassassin reads its options from the psa database in mysql. Changing max children can be done there by simply updating the variable spamfilter_max_children and then restarting spamassassin.
However, there were no options in there for log file, debugging etc. - I guess the folks at Plesk figure we don't or would not possibly need them.
Anyway, to get the log to go where I needed it I did the following:
vi /usr/bin/spamd
:s/spamd.log - that gets you near the default logging definition
find and change my $log_facility = $opt{'syslog'} || 'mail'; to my $log_facility = $opt{'syslog'} || 'file';
a few lines down from there:
find and change my $log_file = "spamd.log"; to my $log_file = "full path and filename of where you want the log"; (make sure that popuser can write to it)
This will continue to work until spamassassin or psa-spamassassin gets updated, then you need to do it again.
As for other options that plesk sets you can do the following:
ps -AF |grep spamd and see what options plesk starts spamd with, those you probably can't modify (well you could, but you would really have to hack on spamd)
I would suspect you could modify spamd to simply default to any other options you might need to run.
Another way to modify how it runs (at least until a psa-spamassassin restart is):
ps -AF |grep spamd
You will get something like:
/usr/bin/spamd --username=popuser --daemonize --nouser-config --helper-home-dir=/var/qmail --max-children 7 --create-prefs --virtual-config-dir=/var/qmail/mailnames/%d/%l/.spamassassin --pidfile=/var/run/spamd/spamd_full.pid --socketpath=/tmp/spamd_full.sock
Then you can simply do a killall -9 spamd
Then paste the command line back out there with your additional or replacement options and restart it. In my case, I simply wanted to start it with --debug=all to check on another problem so I pasted this:
/usr/bin/spamd --username=popuser --daemonize --nouser-config --helper-home-dir=/var/qmail --max-children 7 --create-prefs --virtual-config-dir=/var/qmail/mailnames/%d/%l/.spamassassin --pidfile=/var/run/spamd/spamd_full.pid --socketpath=/tmp/spamd_full.sock --debug=all
and it works great.