Tim wrote:
On Wed, 2008-02-20 at 13:12 +0100, Henning Larsen wrote:
I have .fetchmailrc for all users in /root, and get the message that
fetchmail should not be run as root. Where should I put .fetchmailrc
and how should I start it, from rc.local? or as a service.
In my rc.local files I have lines like the following (below). And each
user has their ~/.fetchmailrc file set for whatever servers their
accounts will poll.
su tim -c "/usr/bin/fetchmail -d 900"
su john -c "/usr/bin/fetchmail -d 1200"
su jane -c "/usr/bin/fetchmail -d 1500"
I picked different polling periods so that mail runs will not run at the
same time as each other (spreading the workload around). Any user can
stop their own automatic poll, and restart it, if they want to.
Why would you not just have a single cron job which runs fetchmail
without the -d? I used to just kick off the "poll all" script every 12
minutes.
Ideally you would have all mail for all of your users put to a single
mail account, poll that, and let local mail delivery hand it out.
Clearly that takes cooperation from the server you're polling.
I only roughly picked different time periods, if I really wanted to
ensure that they hardly ever ran at the same time, I'd have used prime
numbers. But I'm too lazy to bother to work out large prime numbers,
and I don't think it's that important for me. It'd be different if you
had a large number of users, then it might be quite beneficial.
--
Bill Davidsen <davidsen@xxxxxxx>
"We have more to fear from the bungling of the incompetent than from
the machinations of the wicked." - from Slashdot
