Installing qmail/supervise under fc9

I’ve spent the evenings of the last few days trying to upgrade a few Fedora Core 8 (fc8) boxes to fc9. I’ll get into the gory details of it all in some other post; at this point, suffice it to say my mailserver, running qmail, caused me big grievances. Reason? The supervise script as specified in /etc/inittab didn’t start.

Looking at the file everything looked fine. The line

SV:123456:respawn:/command/svscanboot

was indeed present, but “qmailctl stat” kindly informed me the services weren’t running.

# qmailctl stat
/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
/service/qmail-pop3d: supervise not running
/service/qmail-pop3d/log: supervise not running
messages in queue: 0
messages in queue but not yet preprocessed: 0

Finally I found a blog entry that pointed me in the right direction. It also included a pointer to this blog entry.
In short, it seems fc9 uses another boot sequence than fc8 and earlier versions. Note too that the two scripts in the above mentioned links look slightly different.
You probably want to read up on things by investigating

man events
man initctl

This guide also contains some useful information.
After some experimenting I got the script right, and it looks like

# svscan - daemontools
#
# This service starts daemontools from the point the system is
# started until it is shut down again.

start on runlevel 2
start on runlevel 3
start on runlevel 4
start on runlevel 5

stop on shutdown

respawn
exec /command/svscanboot

Put this in /etc/event.d/svscan and reboot – or simply test it by “start svscan”. Verify by invoking initctl list.

# initctl list
control-alt-delete (stop) waiting
logd (stop) waiting
prefdm (stop) waiting
rc0 (stop) waiting
rc1 (stop) waiting
rc2 (stop) waiting
rc3 (stop) waiting
rc4 (stop) waiting
rc5 (stop) waiting
rc6 (stop) waiting
rcS (stop) waiting
rcS-sulogin (stop) waiting
serial (instance)
sulogin (stop) waiting
svscan (start) running, process 1862
tty1 (start) running, process 1749
tty2 (start) running, process 1745
tty3 (start) running, process 1747
tty4 (start) running, process 1738
tty5 (start) running, process 1743
tty6 (start) running, process 1751
vpnc-cleanup (stop) waiting

–Jesper Högström