initrtab behavuour

[Dan Am]

This actually concerns a linux system, but I get a faster anwer her :-)
I thought I'
s get bright , and insert the sendmail daemon into inittab with:
mail:35:respawn:/usr/sbin/sendmail -bd -q30m -om
which is ok; only the way it works is funny:
1. I kill the daemon.
2) Nothing happens for ca. 3 mins
3) sendmail comes up in 8 instances
4) the surplus instances die after ca 3 mins.

How come ?
Anybody know where to to tune this ?

Regards
Dan

[Dan Am]

ps.: Sorry for the typos.

[Kodjo Agbenu]

Hello Dan,

The "-bd" option tells sendmail to run in daemon mode.
Using inittab with "respawn" directive, you tell the "init" process to restart the sendmail daemon when it dies. In my opinion, it is not a good idea to mix both mechanisms.

If you look at "xdm" (or prefdm) in /etc/inittab, a "nodaemon" option is explicitly specified.

For sendmail in inittab, I would suggest "-bD" (capital D):

mail:35:respawn:/usr/sbin/sendmail -bD -q30m -om

The "-bd" (small d) should be used only when sendmail is started from command-line or rc scripts.

Good luck.

Kodjo

[Dan Am]

To my own surprise, "-bD" did not change a thing,hmmm...
I think the problem is with sendmail going into daemon mode, it becommes a different process, and thus the original calling process is dead. There may some issues in handling this, I figure.

[U.SivaKumar_2]

hi,
try using "once" instead of "respawn".

regards,
U.SivaKumar.