Problems with daemon automount, kerneld and smail

[Dinh-Tuan.Pham@imag.fr]

	Hi all,
	In a previous post, I have reported that the autofs system
dosen't work reliably. I think now I know why: the daemon automount
dies misteriously some time after boot. Just after boot, if I lauch
ps aux, I see /usr/sbin/automount listed but later on (may be several
miutes), ps wouldn't list this daemon. As a result, if automount is
involked shortly after boot, it works. Further, if automount dies
before it has unmounted the directory, it remains mounted. Therefore
autofs sometime seem to works but it is not.
	The same thing happens with kerneld. In fact keneld seems to
dies immediately adter being started. Or may be it has never started
since I never see it in the output of ps aux. But I see the message
"starting kerneld" at boot time so I presume it has started. As a
result, when I try to mount a DOS disquette, I get the message that
the file type vfat is not supported by the kernel. This is true but
the module vfat.o is there and kerneld should automatically load it
into the kernel. So I load the module manually by insmod and it works.
By restarting kerneld through /etc/init.d/kerneld, it works "almost".
What happens is that the subsequent mount command hangs. But after I
kill it I see that the module vfat has been loaded and a second mount
command works properly.
	I also have a problem with smail which may be daemon related.
I have reported that I can't configure smail: At the end of the setup,
sending a test message results in a failure: smail failed 10/ . Now I
tried a different setup. Instead of asking the configuration program
to "Generate a line in /etc/inetd.conf" to start a smail session For
every remote-connections, I ask it to start the smail daemon at boot
time. Then I get the message


/etc/init.d/smail: line 40:   780 Bus error              (core dumped) start-st
op-daemon --start --quiet --exec $DAEMON -- $FLAGS

But the configuration program still reports "Configuration installed."
and then asking me to send a test message. Obviously, it desen't
work: I get

smail failed 138/

	I woukld appreciate any help to solve these problems. I may be 
able to live without autofs (permanent mount at boot) or keneld (load
all modules at boot) but the mail service is very important these
days.

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PHAM Dinh Tuan                         | e-mail: Dinh-Tuan.Pham@imag.fr
Laboratoire de Modelisation et Calcul  | Tel: +33 4 76 51 44 23
BP 53, 38041 Grenoble cedex (France)   | Fax: +33 4 76 63 12 63
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