[Mimedefang] OT: Sendmail Startup Script Question

[John Rowan Littell]

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Lo, Ashley M. Kirchner and the coffee pot sang in unison:

> Jeff Grossman wrote:
>
> >I am running Redhat 7.3.  I have my sendmail startup script to start two
> >instances of Sendmail.  One for normal mail delivery and the other for
[snip]
>     Hrm, I had to do quite a bit of adjusting to get things working
> properly.  For starters, as you noted, upon bootup only one instance of
> sendmail comes up.  By default only on instance will shut down.  Yeah,
> issues.  I also wanted to start up mimedefang and the multiplexor at the
> same time, and rebuild the various databases that sendmail uses.  After
> several trial and errors, I finally got to a script that has been
> working well for me for months now.  I've attached it as a .zip file.

I am not normally a RedHat admin, so I may be wrong, but...

Note that on RedHat 7.3, it looks to me like the daemon() function in
startup scripts (/etc/rc.d/init.d/functions) will normally refuse to
start two instances of a program.  The reason Ashley's script works,
it appears, is because sendmail doesn't have the privs to write a
/var/run/sendmail.pid file, so the second daemon() call for sendmail
succeeds -- daemon() checks to see if the process is running only by
looking for /var/run/${base}.pid and not by using pidof (like
killproc() does).

This script wouldn't work on RedHat 6.2, since daemon() there looks
for the process by using pidof as well as the /var/run pid file.  We'd
probably want to tweak it a bit so that it took this sort of vendor
capriciousness into account...

  --rowan

- -- 
John "Rowan" Littell
Systems Administrator
Earlham College Computing Services
http://www.earlham.edu/~littejo/
2002-12-19 07:57
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