Re: [Fetchmail-users] Fetchmail seems to silently fail when I use the --pidfile option

[Matthias A. <mat...@gm...>]

Am 12.10.20 um 23:04 schrieb Alex Hall:
> Hello,
> I've used fetchmail for a couple years, as a way of pulling emails
> into the Request Tracker ticket system I set up for my work. I'm
> trying to better automate it, by setting it up with Monit. To do that,
> I want to use the --pidfile option when starting or quitting
> fetchmail, which I've not tried before.
>
> First, the details. I'm on Debian 8, with fetchmail 6.3.26. I
> installed this from Debian's package manager; I didn't compile any
> source. I know Debian 8 is outdated, but we're stuck on this server
> for a while for various reasons. The server reports that this is the
> most recent version of fetchmail it can find.
>
> In the past, I'd start fetchmail manually (this is part of what I want
> to automate with Monit). I use this command:
> sudo -u rt-user fetchmail -f /path/rt4/fetchmailrc
>
> To let Monit have a known pid file to monitor, I tried this command:
> sudo -u rt-user fetchmail -f /path/rt4/fetchmailrc --pidfile
> /var/run/rt_fetchmail.pid
>
> When I run that command in the terminal, nothing at all happens. I get
> no output, /var/run/rt_fetchmail.pid is not created, and fetchmail
> doesn't seem to run. I should say here that the fetchmailrc file being
> used commands fetchmail to start as a daemon. If I leave off the
> --pidfile bit, the daemon starts as expected. I can then
> sudo -u rt-user fetchmail --quit
> to kill it. Running that quit command after using the --pidfile
> variant produces no output.
>
Assuming it's a stopgap before the server is going to be replaced:

You can try and run fetchmail with the additional options     --nosyslog
--logfile /dev/stderr
and see if that gives you output, or possibly add -d0 to override any
"set daemon" directives in your fetchmailrc file.

> It seems like the --pidfile option causes a silent failure, but I
> can't figure out what's going on. The log only shows normal mail
> managing stuff, with no errors that I've found, and the terminal has
> no output whatsoever.

This is strange, check if the user you "sudo" into has a proper shell
and permissions and the session doesn't crash before starting fetchmail.
Possibly you may also want to install strace and try

sudo -u rt-user strace -f fetchmail -f /path/rt4/fetchmailrc --pidfile
/var/run/rt_fetchmail.pid

and see where it all ends up. (strace -o /path/to/dumpfile <- that saves
the output).