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Date:      Fri, 18 Aug 2000 07:49:32 +0100
From:      Karl Pielorz <kpielorz@tdx.co.uk>
To:        Warner Losh <imp@village.org>
Cc:        hackers@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: Critical (or equivalent) section in Userland?
Message-ID:  <399CDC7C.F68E634@tdx.co.uk>
References:  <399C5201.5B6911CE@tdx.co.uk>  <399BA212.A84240AE@tdx.co.uk> <200008171723.LAA12924@harmony.village.org> <200008172140.PAA14347@harmony.village.org>

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Warner Losh wrote:

> Kill sendmail's root process.  That's the best you can do.  It won't
> impact anything, it will prevent the reading of the queue files (and
> the config files) and the children will just run with the old copies.
> then you wait for all the children to die (with a reasonable
> timeout).  Then you do your change, then restart sendmail.  That's the
> best you can hope for.

Unforuntately this doesn't work, as sendmails numerous children live for too
long (the machine is a busy MX, and people increasingly mail 5Mb+ files
around)

Also adding to the children's lives is the fact that sendmail uses cached
connections to delivery multiple messages to the same destination MX, which
leads to even longer 'death' times, and can also result in Sendmail's kids
looking up domains etc. in the config files :( [At least, that's what appears
to be happening after a lot of observation]...

However, 'killall -SIGSTOP sendmail' - appears to work very nicely... With a
'killall -SIGCONT sendmail' putting things back to normal. I'm also doing the
stop twice for good measure incase anything was forking at the time.

I guess only time will tell, but the signal idea seems the best so far,
considering the other restrictions :)

Regards,

Karl


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