Hello All,
can someone please help me with some conceptual advice? I have just
(finally!) moved from dial-up to broadband, and now I am not quite
sure how I should be running my email processes.
Before the change, I would dial up manually as needed using kinternet.
In order to run fetchmail and sendmail whenever the connection came
up, I had this in my /etc/ppp/ip-up.local
/sbin/rcfetchmail oneshot
/usr/sbin/sendmail -q
Now with broadband there is no dial-up any more (obviously), and once
the ADSL modem is on and going, the connection is simply there. So the
whole ppp stuff doesn't run, which means that something needs to be
changed to run the mail processes. Now here are the alternatives (as
far as I can see them):
1. Turn the ADSL on before booting; start up fetchmail
automatically when booting (using rcfetchmail) with some sensible
polling interval; configure postfix to send out any outgoing mail
straight away.
2a.If the ADSL modem is not always on, the solution above does not
work smoothly and neatly. Starting fetchmail and sendmail manually
works all right but is not an option, because it is too laborious.
But it would be possible to start the fetchmail daemon with an
"interface" line telling it to only poll when the interface is up.
I don't know about sendmail though...
2b.Again, if the connection is not on permanently, I could start up
something like this at boot time:
while (true); do
(
dig www.telecom.co.nz IN A &
DIG_PID=$!
{ sleep 5; kill $DIG_PID; } &
sleep 10
wait $DIG_PID
) 2>/dev/null | grep -q ’ˆ[ˆ;]*telecom.co.nz’ && break
done
/sbin/rcfetchmail oneshot
/usr/sbin/sendmail -q
This should continuously check whether there is a connection, and
once there is, it would run a fetchmail poll and flush the mail
queue once, and then exit (so this would be functionally equivalent
to what I had before with dial-up).
2c.Again, if the connection is not on permanently, I could still run
ppp over the ADSL and keep everything as it is, couldn't I?
Although I am not too sure how this would be implemented in
detail...
Now number 1. is not an option for me, because I am actually spending
most of the time working offline (writing, working on photos etc.),
and for a number of reasons I do not want to have the ADSL modem on
and connected all the time. So it is a premise that the connection is
not permanent. Therefore something along the lines of 2a, 2b, or 2c
should work all right.
But which one of these is the preferred way to do it? Or am I missing
it completely, and there is another way of how this actually should be
done?
Any advice would be appreciated.
Kind regards,
Helmut.
--
+------------------------+
| Helmut Walle |
| [email protected] |
| +64-3-388 39 54 |
+------------------------+
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