Could fetchmail get started/stopped in /etc/network/if-*.d?

[hunger]

Hi there!

As fetchmail is only useful if a network connection is available, would it be possible to start/stop it as part of the network setup process? This would be somewhat similar to how ntpdate is handled nowadays in dapper.

It could get started in if-up.d if it is not yet running and stopped in if-down.d once no more interfaces are open. Both cases would need to ignoring lo of course.

This would get rid of one process when the host is not connected to a network, freeing ~2MiB of RAM that is hard to swap out (fetchmail runs regularly after all). It would further make one more init-script obsolete, sliming down the boot process some more.

PS: Couldn't other network services get handled in a similar way? What good are things like samba without a non-lo interface?

[Martin Pitt (pitti)]

Hi Scott, it seems that this is merely a question of moving the init script to if-up.d, right?

[hunger (hunger)]

There are scripts in /etc/ppp/ip-up.d that start/stop fetchmail.

[Scott James Remnant (Canonical) (canonical-scott)]

Mostly yes, it'd need modifying and unifying with whatever else is there. But go for it, next week while we're together could be good.

[Martin Pitt (pitti)]

OK, assigning to me

[hunger (hunger)]

Changing status to "confirmed" after two developers agreed to it.

[Bryce Harrington (bryce)]

It looks like this has been implemented by fetchmail.ppp.ip-down / fetchmail.ppp.ip-up in current fetchmail, so this can be closed as resolved.