[fetchmail]Fetchmail daemon mode

[Matthias Andree]

"Bill Greganti" <t20030101@greganti.com> writes:

>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: fetchmail-friends-admin@lists.ccil.org 
>> [mailto:fetchmail-friends-admin@lists.ccil.org] On Behalf Of 
>> Matthias Andree
>> Sent: Sunday, April 17, 2005 12:36 PM
>> To: fetchmail-friends@lists.ccil.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 the Debian guys must've poked the code. I don't have a "fetchmail"
user on my non-Debian system.

Please don't assume $DISTRIBUTOR's behavior is the same as default.

> 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.

I wonder if some of the service dispatchers can handle such tasks, there
are cron variants, runit, uoschedule, but I don't know about their
capabilities.

>> 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. :)

If you get those 10 processes up before work is over or you need to go
to bed. :)

>> 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.

Indeed, which is why separate configuration files, one per user, or
grouped by upstream server at most, are my recommendation.

-- 
Matthias Andree