Bug#449287: /etc/init.d/exim4 gives "no such process" error when stopping exim4

[Andreas Metzler]

On 2007-11-28 Frans Pop <elendil at planet.nl> wrote:
> severity 449287 important
> thanks

> I've been seeing the same issue for some time on several systems,
> therefore raising priority.

> Here's the debug (set -x) output for the stop command during shutdown.
> Hope it helps.

> At first glance, the problem seems to be that first 'killproc' is being
> called and later also start-stop-daemon. And then later there also a
> 'kill -0'...

[...]
> + /sbin/start-stop-daemon --stop --pidfile /var/run/exim4/exim.pid --retry 5 --quiet --oknodo
> /sbin/start-stop-daemon: warning: failed to kill 2121: No such process
> + status=0
[...]

Hello,
I can reproduce this, the error is generated when killproc invokes

/sbin/start-stop-daemon --stop --pidfile /var/run/exim4/exim.pid --retry 5 --quiet --oknodo

It is easy to reproduce, start exim, invoke the abovementioned s-s-d
command. stracing s-s-d seems to suggest that s-s-d expects exim4 to
remove the pidfile when it terminates, but exim does not. s-s-d then
tries to terminate exim4 *again* and fails.

4418  open("/var/run/exim4/exim.pid", O_RDONLY|O_LARGEFILE) = 3
4418  fstat64(3, {st_dev=makedev(8, 7), st_ino=11010177, st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_nlink=1, st_uid=0, st_gid=102, st_blksize=4096, st_blocks=8, st_size=5, st_atime=2007/12/01-13:19:33, st_mtime=2007/12/01-13:19:33, st_ctime=2007/12/01-13:19:33}) = 0
4418  mmap2(NULL, 4096, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0xff9ee7c8) = 0xf7f42000
4418  read(3, "4411\n", 4096)           = 5
4418  close(3)                          = 0
4418  munmap(0xf7f42000, 4096)          = 0
4418  kill(4411, SIGTERM)               = 0
4418  gettimeofday({1196511580, 568567}, NULL) = 0
4418  gettimeofday({1196511580, 568589}, NULL) = 0
4418  open("/var/run/exim4/exim.pid", O_RDONLY|O_LARGEFILE) = 3
4418  fstat64(3, {st_dev=makedev(8, 7), st_ino=11010177, st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_nlink=1, st_uid=0, st_gid=102, st_blksize=4096, st_blocks=8, st_size=5, st_atime=2007/12/01-13:19:40, st_mtime=2007/12/01-13:19:33, st_ctime=2007/12/01-13:19:33}) = 0
4418  mmap2(NULL, 4096, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0xff9ee7c8) = 0xf7f42000
4418  read(3, "4411\n", 4096)           = 5
4418  close(3)                          = 0
4418  munmap(0xf7f42000, 4096)          = 0
4418  kill(4411, SIG_0)                 = -1 ESRCH (No such process)

cu andreas
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