qmail/daemontools - 'supervise' service shuts down randomly
 

Hi there,

I've recently installed qmail on a RedHat distro, in precise accordance with the "Life with qmail" instructions. After a bit of backing and forthing, I managed to get the service up and running, and initial tests all checked out - I could send mail, no problem.

The following day, although I hadn't changed anything in the meantime, nothing seemed to be working. I did a:

qmailctl stat

at the command line, and got back the following:

/service/qmail-send: supervise not running
/service/qmail-send/log: supervise not running
/service/qmail-smtpd: supervise not running
/service/qmail-smtpd/log: supervise not running
messages in queue: 7
messages in queue but not yet preprocessed: 0

Okay - so it wasn't a problem with qmail itself, but rather with the daemontools "supervise" process. Running:

svscanboot &

Put things right immediately, and qmail started ticking up again, across the board. Emails went through, all was good.

Until about 20-30 minutes later, the same problem recurred. And so on, and so forth. I can correct the problem easily by doing either:

svscanboot &

or

svscan /service &

but still, a short while later, supervise goes down again. It's worth noting that the qmail process persists, and doesn't ever fail - but in lieu of daemontools' supervise being up, it can't function correctly.

I've removed and reinstalled daemontools from scratch, I've gone over my configurations with a fine-tooth comb, but I can't find any trace of anything that could be going wrong. If anyone's had any experience with this kind of thing, I'd be really grateful for any advice.

Thanks so much,

- Kamineko

The /service directory is actually a symlink to /var/qmail/supervise directory, I wonder if there is a permission problem which is causing the issue.