The Site With the Lamp

August 22, 2006

Our mail server never had support for POP (Who uses POP?), then I thought of trying to install a pop server it just for fun. In actual fact, vpopmail is present on it but it doesn't run as a POP server. So all that needs to be done is to create the 'service' directories according to the instructions (life with qmail). After doing so, I am seeing this rather suprising error.

The directory has been created and the permissions are correct! There were a couple of entries on google with the same error being reported with /service/qmail-smtpd/log or even /service/qmail-smtpd instead of the popper. Only a few suggestions were unearthed in the seach and even fewer seemed sensible. Many had suggested a reboot. This particular server has not been rebooted in 318 days and damned if I will restart it now.

Instead I tried killing supervise. That seemed to make things worse. qmailctl says; "qmail is not running" but it actually is running! qmailctl stop and qmailctl start have stopped being usefull. Then I killed svcscanboot. No change. Then I killed svcscan, now at last qmail really does seem to be dead. Good, that's a step in the right direction, let's try to get it back to life.

Hang on a second isn't svcscanboot supposed to be respawned? well it's not happening. I guess I must have messed something else up. How about running svcscan manually? that results in the 400 dots generated by readproctitle continously scrolling off the screen at a rapid pace along with some other messages. This is not going to work.

How about manually running the svcscanboot command? I know I am not supposed to do this, but I did and it worked!