trouble getting fetchmail to start
I'm running exim and fetchmail. I recently changed from using a dial-up
connection to DSL. It's a wonderful change, but I'm having trouble getting
fetchmail to start without my assistance. I'd appreciate any help.
fetchmail was being started by my ip-up scripts, which activate when a dial
up connection starts.
My first thought was to create an init.d/script for fetchmail (I used the
one for exim as a model). Then I ran .. (can't remember the name and I'm
not on Debian right now) script to automatically put the "usual" links in
rc?.d/, giving it a sequence number (25) that was higher than
exim's. Initially I didn't have the right permissions, but I fixed them.
It doesn't work, and it leaves no trace of why in the logs. fetchmail is
configured to write to fetchmail.log, but after doing a find from / I
couldn't find any written after my boot up.
When I say "/etc/init.d/fetchmail start" fetchmail starts right away (in
daemon mode).
I also looked at the ifup configuration files, but if I use them I'll be
starting fetchmail before exim.
My two main suspicions center around user id problems or timing problems:
1) Maybe rc2.d/S25fetchmail starts as some user without the proper
permissions (it is root that has the accounts set up, and that was running
in my ppp days). The man pages for inittab and the follow on scripts don't
provide much of a clue about the uid they run under, but I gather from
other posts here it's as root. So that seems to rule that out.
2) exim is still starting up when fetchmail kicks off, and fetchmail dies
when it finds noone to talk SMTP to.
Maybe--but it seems odd I get no error messages. And I don't know what I
could do about it (short of adding a pause, which seems like a major hack)
if it were true.
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