[exim] Question on daemon-light PID file creation during fir…

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Author: Fiedler Roman
Date:  
To: exim-users@exim.org
Subject: [exim] Question on daemon-light PID file creation during first install with IPv6 disable (4.76-3ubuntu3.2)
Hi,

I've a question regarding the correct moment of PID-file creation when starting the Exim daemon during install:

With the default inside the package, Exim wants to bind to ::1, which is prohibited on that system. When failing, Exim retries for some minutes to see if it has just to wait for the interface to come up, which does not help in that case. During that timespan, no PID file is yet created.

During automatic deployment, Exim daemon halt is triggered immediately after install, configuration is partially deleted, modified created and daemon restarted. Since the already running daemon did not write a PID file yet, some systems end up with 2 Exims running in parallel until first terminates with paniclog entries. It is not clear, if under certain circumstances both daemons might terminate (like dining philosophers problem), leaving the system without any running MX.

Question: Should Exim daemon create the PID-file as soon as it starts running, so that it could be terminated using the PID information or should the PID-file creation be postponed until the daemon is fully functional, i.e. bound to all interfaces?

Kind regards,
Roman

BTW: to avoid failing deployments, I use pkill as workaround to get rid of the Exim stuck in startup process.

DI Roman Fiedler
Engineer
Safety & Security Department
Assistive Healthcare Information Technology

AIT Austrian Institute of Technology GmbH
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