Hi,

I am trying to get fetchmail running as a daemon constantly. It will do so but I have to type fetchmail when I boot up to get it to start. I have been going round in circles on how to do this automatically.

Any pointers appreciated I know it has to be easy. I have tried putting it in .kdestart but with no joy.

Thanks

Iain

Find if youve got /etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit and /etc/rc.d/rc.local. Maybe the names or places are different on your system, but these files get run when booting. Just put the line in /etc/rc.d/rc.local to have it run on startup ("man fetchmail" for the correct switches to start it daemonized).

Now if you've got /etc/rc.d this means any daemon you would like to start at boot can be added. just look for the general layout in one of the files in /etc/rc.d/init.d, it should have these lines:

#!/bin/sh
case "$1" in
start)
daemon (name daemon) (options)
;;
kill)
killproc (name daemon) (options)
;;
esac

else put it in the systems crontab.


HTH somehow

Cron would be a much cleaner way to run fetchmail every few minutes or so, if that is what you are after.

oh, handy thing that took me ages to think of:

If you're not online when you boot up, fetchmail will fail. As it can't find the mail server. change the server name in it's .fetchmailrc to the servers IP address, OR add the server details to your /etc/resolv.conf.

I *think* that my fetchmail starts on boot, just by adding 'fetchmail' to rc.local, not totally sure it does.... think so tho

Oh, you do nkow that fetchmail has a daemon mode.. so you don't need to use cron or other scrupting tools!

Not really worth starting a new thread for.. but i was wondering if there was anythign available which can broadcast on to a network when new mail is recieved on the server. i have fetchmail on the server running a daemon at 60seconds, and outlook then checking the imap server on that every 3 minutes.. can't the imap tell me when i have new mail on my network?