One problem with stopping a large Qmail system is waiting for everything to
actually end cleanly.
qmail-remotes can take some time to get done.
At the moment, my system is:
992894705.645395 status: local 78/250 remote 110/250
Those remotes can take a very long time to time out. (10-20 minutes maybe)
I tried automating a qmail stop/start sequence and even with killing all the
remotes to help speed things up, I still couldn't get it stable.
(occasionally the queue process would get confused and think there were still
a few local or remote processes and there were none to be found, or if the
queue were particularly chubby, just cleaning up after all the remotes were
gone would take 2-3 minutes)
This would cause the restart section of the script to fail because the
qmail-start thought qmail was still going. (which of course it wasn't)
Anyway, the moral of the story is on little systems it's not problem, on large
ones it can be diceier.
Greg
