background fsck can be dangerous!

[Andrea Campi]

On Sun, Jul 03, 2005 at 01:45:40AM +0300, Niki Denev wrote:
> Before the background fsck finished some files were unreadable,
> and they happened to be some libraries used by my mail software.
> After the fsck finished these libraries were accessible again and
> everything was normal and working, at least this is what it looked
> like to me.
> So, i think that if i had disabled background fsck (as i did now)
> i should have skipped the loss of these about ten emails...

IMHO this is something you need to solve no matter what. Failure of
a local delivery program shouldn't cause lost or bounced emails;
fixing this is usually just a matter of wrapping the program in
appropriate shell magic to return the "temporary failure" error
level (75 I think). For instance, when using postfix you can just
use the following:

mailbox_command = /your/local/script || exit 75

This way, even if the script fails running for *any* reason, postfix
will just requeue your email. Again, this is not postfix-specific
at all.

Bye,
	Andrea

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