[Mailman-Users] Error running bin/mailmanctl restart

[Larry Stone]

On Thu, 17 Dec 2009, Steve Burling wrote:

> At one point, I compared the stock mailmanctl with that from the one Apple 
> distributes with Mac OS X Server.  The only difference was that the 'start' 
> stanza in main() had been cloned as a 'startf' stanza, with a couple of 
> relatively minor changes, primarily (if I remember correctly) to make it not 
> daemonize, since things run from launchd aren't allowed to daemonize. I 
> *think* that that's what's leading to the problem you see -- mailmanctl 
> daemonizes, launchd cleans it up and it respawns, eventually triggering the 
> error.

I forgot about the deamonizing issue. But, it can sort of be worked 
around. In the note Paul quoted from, we have (and I am the "Me" in the 
quote; I forget who Bryan is):

> I just caught that Bryan notes that he receives an "endless succession" 
> of those messages where as I see one and that's it.
> Comparing our launchd .plist files, I see a few differences:
> Bryan:
>         <key>OnDemand</key>
>         <false/>
> Me:
>         <key>OnDemand</key>
>         <true/>
>         <key>RunAtLoad</key>
>         <true/>

With OnDemand set to false, launchctl thinks you want mailmanctl always 
running. But mailmanctl daemonizes and exits so launchctl tries to 
restart it. With my OnDemand set to true and RunAtLoad set to true, 
launchctl tries to run mailmanctl once at boot and is done with it. That 
mailmanctl exits is find. But it comes at the cost of launchctl not 
knowing anything about Mailman after mailmanctl exits. It won't restart it 
if it subsequently dies (has not been a problem for me. I have a cron job 
that runs hourly and e-mails me if a qrunner is missing not that one ever 
is once it's up and running).

But Paul mentioned that he tried OnDemand = true and RunAtLoad = true and 
no qrunners (Paul, did you reboot or force a reload of the launchd plist 
for mailman?). So we'd need to see log files as to what's happening. If 
there's nothing in any logfile (including system.log), then I'd guess the 
plist was never reloaded.

-- Larry Stone
    lstone19 at stonejongleux.com