Re: dma: could not pick up queue file

There is something I'm not following.

[22:35 wikis dvl ~] % sudo /usr/libexec/dma -q
[22:35 wikis dvl ~] % sudo ps auwx | grep dma      
dvl    42469  0.0  0.1 12808  2376  2  S+J  22:35   0:00.00 grep dma

This tells me the daemon doesn't stick around. It starts, does stuff, goes away.

That does not match what we're seeing in the logs below.

If it is the daemon from the top of the hour, it's been sitting around for nearly 6 minutes.


On Fri, Nov 1, 2024, at 5:46 PM, John Levine wrote:
> The queue flushing daemon is run every hour from your crontab. As I said, once a day is plenty since mail is normally never queued.
> Sent from phone with tiny keyboard, please excuse typos.
> *From:* Dan Langille 
> *Sent:* Fri Nov 01 12:31:39 EDT 2024
> *To:* John Levine , RW via freebsd-questions 
> *Cc:* dale@dalescott.net
> *Subject:* Re: dma: could not pick up queue file
> 
> On Fri, Nov 1, 2024, at 9:23 AM, John R. Levine wrote:
>>  On Fri, 1 Nov 2024, Dan Langille wrote:
>>>  This event occurred today.  These logs are slightly amended to obscure host names and email and IP addresses.
>>> 
>>>  Nov  1 00:00:10 wikis newsyslog[46335]: logfile turned over
>>>  Nov  1 03:05:42 wikis dma[46d60][90243]: new mail from user=root uid=26 envelope_from=<root@wikis.[redacted]>
>>>  Nov  1 03:05:42 wikis dma[dma][90258]: could not pick up queue file: `/var/spool/dma/Q46d60.432a50848050'/`/var/spool/dma/M46d60.432a50848050': No such file or directory
>>>  Nov  1 03:05:42 wikis dma[46d60][90243]: mail to=<dan@example.org> queued as 46d60.432a50848050
>>>  Nov  1 03:05:42 wikis dma[46d60.432a50848050][90243]: <dan@example.org> trying delivery
>>>  Nov  1 03:05:42 wikis dma[46d60.432a50848050][90269]: using smarthost (tallboy.[redacted]:25)
>>>  Nov  1 03:05:42 wikis dma[46d60.432a50848050][90269]: trying remote delivery to tallboy.[redacted] [10.0.0.1] pref 0
>>>  Nov  1 03:05:42 wikis dma[46d60.432a50848050][90269]: <dan@example.org> delivery successful
>>>  Nov  1 03:46:21 wikis dma[46d47][96425]: new mail from user=root uid=26 envelope_from=<root@wikis.[redacted]>
>> 
>>  Look again.  The failure was PID 90258 which I assume is the daemon, not 
>>  90243 which is the program sending the message.  This suggests it is 
>>  indeed a harmless race condition.
>> 
>>  In my experience, the initial delivery always succeeds and it never 
>>  queues, so running the queue daemon once a day just in case should be 
>>  plenty.
> 
> Is this queue daemon sitting around waiting to do something? Where did it come from?
> 
> [16:30 wikis dvl ~] % sudo ps auwwx | grep dma
> dvl    66535  0.0  0.1 12808  2376  1  S+J  16:30   0:00.00 grep dma
> 
> It's not there. So where did it come from?

--
  Dan Langille
  dan@langille.org