starting fetch mail when system boots up

[Don Russell]

Tim wrote:
> On Wed, 2006-05-24 at 20:14 -0700, Don Russell wrote:
>   
>> Is there a (standard/best practices) way to start fetchmail 
>> automatically when the system starts? I've googled and seen that it's 
>> easy, just "service fetchmail start", but when I try that as root, I get 
>> an error that says fetchmail is an unrecognized service.
>>     
>
> In my /etc/rc.local I have entries like this, one per user:
>
> su janedoe -c "/usr/bin/fetchmail -d 900"
> su johndoe -c "/usr/bin/fetchmail -d 913"
>
> NB:  I picked different poll periods so everything doesn't happen at
> once, all the time.

That  looks great! I agree with you about using different polling 
periods... I do that sort of thing too, usually picking prime numbers 
for similar reasons.... increased entropy to make the universe happy. :-)

Does the -d option override the daemon option if coded in the 
~/.fetchmailrc file? man fetchmail doesn't provide that detail.

Regardless, I think it's a good idea to provide the period here, 
ensuring fetchmail is started in daemon mode in case the individual user 
left that out of their .fetchmailrc file.

Thanks :-)