Starting problems on SuSE 8.1

[Kevin Miller]

>-----Original Message-----
>From: Roland Ehle [mailto:mailscanner at CARLO65.DE]
>Sent: Sunday, June 15, 2003 1:16 AM
>To: MAILSCANNER at JISCMAIL.AC.UK
>Subject: Starting problems on SuSE 8.1
>
>
>Hi,
>
>since I migrated from SuSE 7.3 to SuSE 8.1 I have problems
>with starting
>MailScanner.
>
>I start MailScanner 4.21-9 with "rcMailScanner start" and I
>get "failed"
>on standard out, but MailScanner seems to be working fine.
>Same is, when
>MailScanner is started at boot.

Sorry for the lack of timeliness of the response - maybe someone else
answered it already or maybe it's a different problem, but I had the same
issue in 8.0.  It turns out that in the script there is a call to a return
code status utility script along the lines of:

. /etc/rc.status
rc_reset

which expand the rc.status script into the current environment, then set the
r.c to (I think) null.

As the script trundles through it's processing, in the start section, it
starts sendmail and MailScanner, then checks the return code.  Sendmail is a
program, so it returns a valid r.c. but check_MailScanner is a script, which
I think has it's own environment and it apparently doesn't know about the
parent environment.  Thus, the program starts just fine, but the return code
fails as it's not passed back to the calling script.  I modified mine as
below - you can see I just remmed out the last rc_status check:

    start)
        echo -n "Initializing Sendmail with In_Args"
        startproc    -p $srvpid /usr/sbin/sendmail $SENDMAIL_IN_ARGS
        rc_status -v
        echo -n "Initializing Sendmail with Client_Args"
        startproc -f -p $msppid /usr/sbin/sendmail $SENDMAIL_CLIENT_ARGS
        rc_status -v
        echo -n "Initializing Sendmail with Out_Args"
        startproc -f -p $srvoutpid /usr/sbin/sendmail $SENDMAIL_OUT_ARGS
        rc_status -v
        echo "Initializing MailScanner via check_MailScanner"
        startproc -f -p $mspid /usr/sbin/check_MailScanner > /dev/null
#        rc_status -v
        ;;

To insure that MailScanner is actually started it's easy enough to run ps
afterwards if in doubt.  It's never failed to start for me though.  I did
spend a few days trying to track this one down - plumb boggled me for a bit,
until I threw it out to my local Linux Users Group...

HTH...

...Kevin
-------------------
Kevin Miller                Registered Linux User No: 307357
CBJ MIS Dept.               Network Systems Administrator, Mail
Administrator
155 South Seward Street     ph: (907) 586-0242
Juneau, Alaska 99801        fax: (907 586-4500

>