Re: systemwide fetchmail
"Sandip" == Sandip P Deshmukh <Sandip> writes:
Sandip> On Sat, Nov 09, 2002 at 01:38:22AM -0500, Stephen Gran
Sandip> wrote:
>> This one time, at band camp, Sandip P Deshmukh said: > is not
>> there a way in which i can ask the fetchmail daemon to look for
>> > .fetchmailrc files in different user directories? > - sandip
>>
>> Sadly, no. This is the difference between system-wide and
>> per-user jobs. Can you imagine the overhead if fetchmail had
>> to sort over 11,000 different user accounts, see who has a
>> .fetchmailrc, and start up a seperate process for each?
Sandip> the same can happen if these users were to fire fetchmail
Sandip> from their respective logins? may be fetchmail daemon
Sandip> should not look for 'all' users but only those who have
Sandip> logged in
The point Stephen made was that the .fetchmailrc file exists exactly
so that users can control what is fetched, when it is fetched, and how
is fetched. The systemwide daemon exists for the administrator to
control these parameters for a class of users.
What you want can be easily be done by editing the default login and
logout scripts of your system to test if a user has a .fetchmailrc
file and start fetchmail if that is the case, and do the appropriate
things to shut it down on logout. As a user, I would find this far too
intrusive. If I am writing my own .fetchmailrc I can automatically run
fetchmail when I login, rather than have some one decide the policy
used to start things up.
>From both a users and administrators point of view what you are asking
for is usually suboptimal. It does not work well for either
group. (Example: how does a user with a .fetchmailrc file tell the
system she does NOT want fetchmail run unless it is run from the
command line?).
Cheers!
Shyamal
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