fetchmail: lock creation failed
Hello,
(Although I'm not subscribed to this list, as my email is broken,
I was hoping someone here might give me a nudge in the right
direction. I'll keep watching the public archives for responses.)
I'm running Woody with 2.4.18 and mutt, fetchmail, exim, etc.,
using a (functional) serial modem.
The modem annoyingly disconnects after a couple of minutes if
nothing is being up/downloaded. I searched the fetchmail man page
for ways of stopping this, but nothing I tried did it. I suspect
that some service started at bootup (diald?) is behind this, but
I don't understand enough to know what.
Anyway, then I (foolishly) thought of running a while-do loop in
BASH to issue a fetchmail command and then sleep for a couple of
minutes:
$ while true; do sleep 120; fetchmail; done
This worked, but was unstoppable. CTRL-C stopped each process
(I think) but the loop continued. Only by holding down CTRL-C
(I think it was) did I manage to stop it, which generated an
error (forgotten now). Sorry to be vague, but this happened a
few weeks ago. Since then, every time I try and fetchmail,
I get the message:
fetchmail: lock creation failed.
So I'm assuming that some flag has been set so that fetchmail
thinks it is still open or something, maybe like spinlocks in SMP
code (not that I understand them much either!).
If I type:
$ fetchmail -q
..to kill any demon process, I get:
fetchmail: no other fetchmail is running.
I tried a Google Linux search for "lock creation failed", but
failed to find an answer I understood. One suggestion was to do:
$ strace fetchmail
which gave a list of what was happening. I did notice that it
was looking for some files in my home directory which weren't
found, namely:
/etc/ld.so.preload
/var/run/.nscd_socket
/home/spock/.fetchids
/home/spock/.netrc
Should they be there, or have they been wiped/corrupted somehow?
I did have some filesystem trouble a while back when fsck did some
repairs following a crash. My .fetchmailrc file is OK.
Any help seriously appreciated - either about the disconnecting
modem, or especially the lock creation thing so I can get mail
back.
Cheers
Malcolm Smith
Reply to: