Topic: qmail service - "normally down"???

[Allun]

Hi all,

can anyone tell me what this means?
It's happenning on 2 machines, one is SME 5.6 and the other 6.0b3.

Both have the e-smith-servicecontrol (1.1.0-04) contrib to allow manipulation of system services from the web manager.

I can't recall doing anything to do with mail or anything that would have caused this, but when i ask for the status of qmail, i get this:

service qmail status
/service/qmail: up (pid 1158) 5042 seconds, normally down

So, I think, "well, i'll just re-enable it..." and sure enough, when i look at the web manager panel for service-control, i find that "Mail Transport" - comprised of:
qmail.init
smtpd
smtpfwdd

is not ticked.  

So i tick  the appropriate box, save changes, and watch /var/log/messages scroll past with update messages and config changes and such, but when I try "service qmail status" again I still get:

service qmail status
/service/qmail: up (pid 1158) 6148 seconds, normally down

And going back to the web panel the Mail Transport service is unticked again!

I tried checking in the db:

/sbin/e-smith/db configuration getprop qmail status
gives me "enabled" in return,  so that's a good thing at least.

so - what does this "normally down" mean?
     - if the service says "enabled" in the database, can i assume that all is well? note, i can't really reboot and just see if it starts, at least not until the weekend!)

TIA

Allun

[Byte]

My guess is, it means that the currently running supervise did not spawn the
currently running qmail

So your OK basically!!

HTH

Byte

[Charlie Brady]

Allun wrote:

> so - what does this "normally down" mean?

That means that supervise doesn't start it immediately, but waits until the /etc/rc.d/rc7.d/ script is run to start it (after, e.g. networking is started up).

[A supervised service is "normally down" if /service/xxx/down exists.]

Charlie

[Allun]

Thanks for the replies - my mind is now slightly eased!

Charlie: Should I simply rm the "down" file ?

Methinks I now have some reading up to do in how supervise works