-----Original Message-----
From: fetchmail-friends-admin(_at_)lists(_dot_)ccil(_dot_)org
[mailto:fetchmail-friends-admin(_at_)lists(_dot_)ccil(_dot_)org] On Behalf Of
Matthias Andree
Sent: Sunday, April 17, 2005 12:36 PM
To: fetchmail-friends(_at_)lists(_dot_)ccil(_dot_)org
Subject: Re: [fetchmail]Fetchmail daemon mode
Actually, the daemon runs as the user fetchmail by default, not as
root.
Is this something you're doing explicitly? Just running fetchmail as
root user will not drop privileges.
That's seems to be the default for the Debian package. I haven't
changed anything.
Then run them round-robin according to a particular schedule, with
explicitly giving -d0 to override possible "set daemon 600" options in
user configuration files. This also defangs nonsense such as
"set daemon 1" which would put fetchmail in a tight loop.
The would require me to make a cron job for each user that uses
fetchmail, unless I'm missing some clever way to automate this.
Not being real familiar with fetchmail yet, does anyone see
a problem with thousands of processes running?
You don't want to do that on very old operating systems or if you're
short on memory.
The machine is an Athlon XP 2200 with 1GB of memory. I guess
I'm just a little too used to working with Windows machines where
10 processes running crashes the machine. :)
Also, in the spirit of using a single fetchmail process
against the advice given, does anyone see problem with
writing a script to conpile all of the
~/.fetchmailrc files into /etc/fetchmailrc?
A server that causes timeouts delays mail for all other
users, with many
servers to poll up to the point where a single run of that single run
control file takes longer to process than your users are willing to
accept.
Doh! With thousands of users that could pose a real problem in the
future. It becomes too likely that one server will gum up the whole
process at some point.
I went back and found the script I was looking for, which starts a
fetchmail daemon at boot time for each user which has a .fetchmailrc
file in their home directory. After thinking about it, as the daemons
start, with a poll interval of say 10 minutes, they'll all be spread
out over a few minutes. So I shouldn't have thousands of processes all
waking up at the same time, more like a few every second spread out over
a period of time. That doesn't seem so bad I guess.
Thanks for all the help so far.