qmil-run sets up the wrong symbolic links so qmail won't start

[Jon Thackray]

From a fresh installation of qmail I find

jon@frobenius:/etc/qmail/qmail-send$ ls -l supervise
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 29 May 21 20:17 supervise -> /var/lib/supervise/qmail-send

jon@frobenius:/etc/qmail/qmail-send$ ls -l /var/lib/qmail/supervise/
total 12
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 21 Mar 3 2015 qmail-send -> /etc/qmail/qmail-send
drwx------ 2 root root 4096 May 22 12:23 qmail-send.log
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 22 Mar 3 2015 qmail-smtpd -> /etc/qmail/qmail-smtpd
drwx------ 2 root root 4096 May 22 12:23 qmail-smtpd.log
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 23 Mar 3 2015 qmail-verify -> /etc/qmail/qmail-verify
drwx------ 2 root root 4096 May 22 12:23 qmail-verify.log

jon@frobenius:/var/lib$ sudo qmailctl start
Starting qmail
qmail-send supervise not running
qmail-smtpd supervise not running
qmail-verify supervise not running
jon@frobenius:/var/lib$ sudo qmailctl stat
/etc/service/qmail-send: unable to open supervise/ok: file does not exist
/etc/service/qmail-send/log: unable to open supervise/ok: file does not exist
/etc/service/qmail-smtpd: unable to open supervise/ok: file does not exist
/etc/service/qmail-smtpd/log: unable to open supervise/ok: file does not exist
/etc/service/qmail-verify: unable to open supervise/ok: file does not exist
/etc/service/qmail-verify/log: unable to open supervise/ok: file does not exist
messages in queue: 0
messages in queue but not yet preprocessed: 0

The problem occurs because the files supervise all point to a non-existent directory /var/lib/supervise. The correct directory is /var/lib/qmail/supervise This can be overcome with

jon@frobenius:/var/lib$ sudo ln -s qmail/supervise supervise
jon@frobenius:/var/lib$ sudo qmailctl start
Starting qmail
jon@frobenius:/var/lib$ sudo qmailctl stat
/etc/service/qmail-send: up (pid 57710) 3 seconds
/etc/service/qmail-send/log: up (pid 57722) 3 seconds
/etc/service/qmail-smtpd: up (pid 57713) 3 seconds
/etc/service/qmail-smtpd/log: up (pid 57721) 3 seconds
/etc/service/qmail-verify: up (pid 57720) 3 seconds
/etc/service/qmail-verify/log: up (pid 57723) 3 seconds
messages in queue: 0
messages in queue but not yet preprocessed: 0

But, I believe the correct fix is to create the correct links from the subdirectories of /etc/qmail

jon@frobenius:/var/lib$ lsb_release -rd
Description: Ubuntu 20.04.2 LTS
Release: 20.04

jon@frobenius:/var/lib$ apt-cache policy qmail-run
qmail-run:
  Installed: 2.0.2+nmu1
  Candidate: 2.0.2+nmu1
  Version table:
 *** 2.0.2+nmu1 500
        500 http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu focal/universe amd64 Packages
        500 http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu focal/universe i386 Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status

I expected qmail to start, and qmailctl stat to show me it running. Instead I got the error messages above

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[amk (9-launchpad-mikus-sk)]

See comment of August 26, 2019 at 12:13 pm at https://ryan.buterbaugh.org/better-qmail-on-ubuntu/ by Ryan Buterbaugh:

I believe this is a bug with runit – the /var/lib/supervise directory is no longer being created as part of the package install. There are two options here:

    Install daemontools-run instead (prior to installing qmail), since it’s an alternative supervisor for qmail and appears to be working properly
    Create the /var/lib/supervise directory manually (prior to installing qmail)