Re: Q: Setting retries on the half-hour?

[alcocer@netcom.com (Dario Alcocer)]

>>>>> "Oliver" == Oliver Xymoron <oxymoron@waste.org> writes:

    Oliver> It sounds like what you really want to use is some form of
    Oliver> UUCP. If your link is not available at all times, you'll
    Oliver> have problems with incoming mail as well.

Unfortunately, that created other problems for me.  I run a mailing
list, and many of my subscribers are on machines that don't have good
DNS MX records (many of their hosts only have A records, and often
their machines are down, meaning mail can't be delivered.)  Hundreds
of messages were ending up in my Internet provider's sendmail queue,
and they finally decided that I should be using SMTP so that my host
could send the messages instead, thereby freeing their mail queues
from my mailing lists undelivered mail.

As far as incoming mail goes, what I implemented was a real hack: I
modified the smtpserver slightly so that it could include the program
name on its command line.  I could then poll (via 'ps -ax | grep
smtpserver') when an incoming SMTP connection was active; of course,
this means that I have to have inetd load it instead of it always
running as daemon.

I know its ugly, but it seems to work; my crontab job keeps polling,
and when no more connections are active, it shuts down the PPP link.
I think doing the polling via netstat would be better, but I need to
get the problem worked out first.

--
Dario Alcocer
alcocer@netcom.com