Re: sendmail on debian testing

On Tue, Feb 3, 2015 at 4:04 PM, Reco <recoverym4n@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi.

On Tue, Feb 03, 2015 at 02:03:25PM +0000, Michael Grant wrote:
> I'm still searching for an answer to this.
>
> After upgrade from wheezy to testing, sendmail no longer starts.
>
> I see that the system is using systemd. I see that the /etc/init.d/sendmail script now runs /bin/systemctl start sendmail.service. But sendmail isn't
> started. Even running '/bin/systemctl start sendmail.service' manually, nothing happens.

A nessesary correction - /etc/init.d/sendmail *tries* to run
'/bin/systemctl start sendmail.service'.

But, since no sendmail* package provide systemd's service file -
nothing happens.

Such behaviour cannot be considered systemd's bug IMO - systemd simply
does what it's intended to do in this case.

But, at the same time, such behaviour can be considered as a sendmail
bug (given that systemd is Jessie's default init, and sendmail is not
starting with this init).

Still, there's a way to workaround this.

Try adding

export _SYSTEMCTL_SKIP_REDIRECT="true"

to /etc/init.d/sendmail

Thanks, this is progress, I can now start sendmail by hand by running '/etc/init.d/sendmail start', but it's not starting automatically at boot time.

I don't know if this has anything to do with that:

# systemctl enable sendmail
Synchronizing state for sendmail.service with sysvinit using update-rc.d...
Executing /usr/sbin/update-rc.d sendmail defaults
Executing /usr/sbin/update-rc.d sendmail enable

# systemctl is-enabled sendmail
Failed to get unit file state for sendmail.service: No such file or directory

also, a better place to add this:

export _SYSTEMCTL_SKIP_REDIRECT="true"

to is /etc/default/sendmail and not modify /etc/init.d/sendmail. Adding this to /etc/default/sendmail seems to work equally as well in that running '/etc/init.d/sendmail start' does manually start sendmail.

Incidentally, the sendmail package even in experimental is significantly out of date. The package appears orphaned. Several people seem to have tried to step up to do something about this but nothing has happened. Is sendmail dead on Debian?