Re: sendmail on debian testing

On Tue, Feb 3, 2015 at 6:26 PM, Ansgar Burchardt <ansgar@debian.org> wrote:

...
Could you try restarting sendmail (systemctl restart sendmail) and show
the output of `systemctl status sendmail'? It also shows the most recent
log entries, but the output of journalctl --unit sendmail --since -5min
might also be useful (if it shows more messages).

So, this is interesting. 'systemctl restart sendmail' with no other changes to the system does start sendmail manually. However, 'systemctl start sendmail' does not, at least, not without Reco's line in /etc/default/sendmail.

so after a REstart which succeeds, the status looks like this:

# systemctl status sendmail

● sendmail.service - LSB: powerful, efficient, and scalable Mail Transport Agent

Loaded: loaded (/etc/init.d/sendmail)

Active: active (running) since Tue 2015-02-03 18:12:38 EST; 4min 8s ago

Process: 3733 ExecStop=/etc/init.d/sendmail stop (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)

Process: 3757 ExecStart=/etc/init.d/sendmail start (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)

CGroup: /system.slice/sendmail.service

└─3785 sendmail: MTA: accepting connections

Feb 03 18:12:36 bottom.networkguild.org systemd[1]: Starting LSB: powerful, e...

Feb 03 18:12:36 bottom.networkguild.org sm-mta[3785]: starting daemon (8.14.4...

Feb 03 18:12:36 bottom.networkguild.org sm-mta[3785]: daemon could not open c...

Feb 03 18:12:36 bottom.networkguild.org sm-mta[3785]: started as: /usr/sbin/s...

Feb 03 18:12:38 bottom.networkguild.org sendmail[3757]: Starting Mail Transpo...

Feb 03 18:12:38 bottom.networkguild.org systemd[1]: Started LSB: powerful, ef...

Hint: Some lines were ellipsized, use -l to show in full.

Now here's something I can't explain. After I do the systemctl restart, now I can do systectl stop and systemctl start and they work fine but only after doing a restart first after boot.

In case this isn't clear:

1) reboot

2) sendmail not running

3) run 'systemctl start sendmail' by hand, exits quickly, sendmail NOT started

4) run 'systemctl restart sendmail'. It takes a few seconds, sendmail starts

5) run 'systemctl stop sendmail'. again, takes a few seconds, sendmail stops

6) run 'systemctl start sendmail', it takes a few seconds, sendmail starts.

When I run systemctl status sendmail just after rebooting, this is what it looks like:

# systemctl status sendmail

● sendmail.service - LSB: powerful, efficient, and scalable Mail Transport Agent

Loaded: loaded (/etc/init.d/sendmail)

Active: active (exited) since Tue 2015-02-03 18:23:25 EST; 1min 27s ago

Process: 2604 ExecStart=/etc/init.d/sendmail start (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)

Feb 03 18:23:24 bottom.networkguild.org sendmail[2604]: Starting Mail Transpo...

Feb 03 18:23:24 bottom.networkguild.org sm-mta[2822]: NOQUEUE: SYSERR(root): ...

Feb 03 18:23:25 bottom.networkguild.org sendmail[2604]: .

Feb 03 18:23:25 bottom.networkguild.org systemd[1]: Started LSB: powerful, ef...

Hint: Some lines were ellipsized, use -l to show in full.

# ps aux | grep sendmail | grep -v grep

There's no sendmail process.

I tried installing sendmail on a minimal test installation and systemd
started at least one daemon ("sendmail: MTA: accepting connections"),
so at least something gets started (though it complained about the test
installation not having a FQDN so other parts might be broken and not
have started).

So one difference is I upgraded a machine from wheezy to testing. Yes, that's the sendmail daemon you see, that's what success looks like. But at least you are getting it to start at boot whereas I am not.