Hello, (Although I'm not subscribed to this list, as my email is broken, I was hoping someone here might give me a nudge in the right direction. I'll keep watching the public archives for responses.)
I'm running Woody with 2.4.18 and mutt, fetchmail, exim, etc., using a (functional) serial modem. The modem annoyingly disconnects after a couple of minutes if nothing is being up/downloaded. I searched the fetchmail man page for ways of stopping this, but nothing I tried did it. I suspect that some service started at bootup (diald?) is behind this, but I don't understand enough to know what. Anyway, then I (foolishly) thought of running a while-do loop in BASH to issue a fetchmail command and then sleep for a couple of minutes: $ while true; do sleep 120; fetchmail; done This worked, but was unstoppable. CTRL-C stopped each process (I think) but the loop continued. Only by holding down CTRL-C (I think it was) did I manage to stop it, which generated an error (forgotten now). Sorry to be vague, but this happened a few weeks ago. Since then, every time I try and fetchmail, I get the message: fetchmail: lock creation failed. So I'm assuming that some flag has been set so that fetchmail thinks it is still open or something, maybe like spinlocks in SMP code (not that I understand them much either!). If I type: $ fetchmail -q ..to kill any demon process, I get: fetchmail: no other fetchmail is running. I tried a Google Linux search for "lock creation failed", but failed to find an answer I understood. One suggestion was to do: $ strace fetchmail which gave a list of what was happening. I did notice that it was looking for some files in my home directory which weren't found, namely: /etc/ld.so.preload /var/run/.nscd_socket /home/spock/.fetchids /home/spock/.netrc Should they be there, or have they been wiped/corrupted somehow? I did have some filesystem trouble a while back when fsck did some repairs following a crash. My .fetchmailrc file is OK. Any help seriously appreciated - either about the disconnecting modem, or especially the lock creation thing so I can get mail back. Cheers Malcolm Smith -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
