Howto Launch Qmail on Fedora 9

Fedora 9 now ships with upstart a poorly documented replacement for init. Upstart completely ignores changes to the inittab file, breaking the life with qmail installation guide (and I suspect many other installations guides as well). I found a few posts with instructions on making upstart start up svscanboot and make it possible to use qmail on Fedora 9 unfortunately those instructions were broken as well. 1) Create the file /etc/event.d/svscanboot as follows.

start on startup start on runlevel 2 start on runlevel 3 start on runlevel 5

exec /package/admin/daemontools-0.76/command/svscanboot

You can use other run levels here if you want to. Once this file is created. you might see something like the following in your system log:

init: /etc/event.d/svscanboot: unable to read: Invalid argument

I am not quite sure what caused it but script works anyway.

2) Check if the script has been auto detected by upstart. initclt list should now produce an output similar to the following:

...

rcS-sulogin (stop) waiting serial (instance) sulogin (stop) waiting svscanboot (start) running, process 11164 tty1 (start) running, process 2523 tty2 (start) running, process 2521 ...

I have read elsewhere that you can use init -q or initctl reload to force uptart to read your new script. Unfortunatley initctl reload isn't even a proper upstart command. The reason that your script doesn't show up in the list is most probably because you have a typho.

3) start it!

initctl start svscanboot