unable to write pid to sendmail.pid

[Julian Field]

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Ah! That helps quite a bit. Thanks for that info. It's not going to get
written into tomorrow's release (I haven't got the energy right now) but
it should eventually make it in.

If you don't see it in the next beta release, please send me this off-list
again as I will have forgotten.

Jules.

>> Julian Field wrote:
>>
>> > I'll have time this weekend to give it a quick look, I would like to
>> > see what has been changed in SuSE 10 anyway, so I'll do a quick
>> > install in VMWare. Exactly what command did you type and exactly
>> > what output did you get? I don't like anything always producing an
>> > error, something must be wrong so I want to fix it. It shouldn't
>> > ever do that, it causes problems for novice users.
>>
>> Running on a SuSE 9.3 box.  Command was "rcMailScanner restart" (stock
>> script from the install - not modified).  See the 12th line down for
>> the error.  I interjected ERROR ---> in case line wrap screws up the
>> line count. . It looks like sendmail-out apparently starts, but there
>
> <SNP>
>
>> ERROR ---> Oct 28 08:31:22 mxl sendmail-out[13735]: unable to write
>> pid to /var/run/sendmail.pid: file in use by another process
>
> <SNIP>
>
> I fixed this on my Solaris boxes the other day.  I am still a luddite
> and manually install MailScanner, so I don't use Julian's install
> scripts and stop init.d files.  I too had been having this error come
> up on restart for a while, as everything was working fine, I ignored
> it.  Last week I had a spare 30 minutes and decided to work out how
> to fix it.
>
> This error started with Sendmail 8.13.*, previous versions quitely
> overwrote the pid file if a second instance of Sendmail tried to
> write to the same file. This behvaiour changed in Sendmail 8.13,
> where Sendmail tries to write a PID file if run as a persitent queue
> runnner, and locks the pid files.
>
> My Mailscanner setup requires three Sendmail instances running:
>
> 1)  The daemon listening on port 25, which places messages in the
> incoming queue, ready for MailScanner to process them.
>
> 2)  The perstistent queue runner that process messages in the
> outgoing queue, after MailScanner has processed them
>
> 3)  The local submit client.
>
> Instances 1 and 3 have always written to different PID files, the
> change in behaviour for 8.13 means that instance 2 tries to write to
> a PID file, and uses the default file, which is already in use by
> instance 1.
>
> I got around this by explicitly setting the PID file for instance 2
> with a command line switch.
>
> So the three instances are started like this now (wrapped for
> legibility):
>
> /usr/lib/sendmail -L sm-mta -bd -ODeliveryMode=queueonly \
> 					-OQueueDirectory=/var/spool/mqueue.in
> /usr/lib/sendmail -q15m -OPidFile=/var/run/sm-queue.pid
> /usr/lib/sendmail -L sm-msp-queue -Ac -q30m
>
>
> I don't know what will happen if you use the -OPidFile swicth for
> earlier versions of Sendmail.
>
> Hope this helps.
>
>
>
> --
> Anthony Peacock
> CHIME, Royal Free & University College Medical School
> WWW:    http://www.chime.ucl.ac.uk/~rmhiajp/
> "On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament!],
> 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will
> the right answers come out?'  I am not able rightly to apprehend the
> kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a
> question.' -- Charles Babbage
>
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>

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