Qmail on Fedora 9.

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Qmail is said to be the second most popular MTA on the net and life with qmail / netqmail is the most popular way of installing it. At the heart of this approach is using ucspi and daemontools rather then xinetd (or god forbid inetd) to start qmail and keep it running. All this revolves around having the following line in the /etc/inittab file:

SV:123456:respawn:/command/svscanboot

The trouble is in Fedora 9, this line will just be ignored by init. You have to use 'upstart' instead. This is what the fedora release notes say:

Fedora 9 features the Upstart initialization system. All System V init scripts should run fine in compatibility mode. However, users who have made customizations to their /etc/inittab file will need to port those modifications to upstart. For information on how upstart works, see the init(8) and initctl(8) man pages. For information on writing upstart scripts, see the events(5) man page, and also the Upstart Getting Started Guide:

http://upstart.ubuntu.com/getting-started.html

That's about as much documentation as available. If you go onto read the upstart getting started guide, you will only end up being confused. For starters the /etc/init.d/jobs/ folder does not exits on fedora. Here is't /etc/event.d

I found a post which explains how to start daemontools with fedora. You create a file named svscanboot in /etc/event.d/ and then use initctl start svscanboot . Trouble is initctl barfs with:

initctl: Unknown job: svscanboot

Apparently you need to reboot for upstart to read the contents of /etc/event.d/ to be reread. Apparently the idiots who decided to include upstart with fedora forgot that this is a linux distro not a vista flavour.

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