On Wed, Oct 12, 2016 at 05:17:20PM +0200, Nicolas George wrote: > You can debug what happens to your script by adding this line near the > beginning: > > strace -f -e execve -s 10000 -o /tmp/my_script.$$.$(date +%Y%m%d%H%M%S) & > > Tomorrow, the file in /tmp will tell you what happened. >
OK I added that line near the beginning of my script, after the intial comments at the beginning and before it actually does anything. I also commented out the line that actually invokes Amanda, for testing purposes. So I can do all the setup before a backup, and all the tear-down afterwards, but not actually do the backup. I then ran the script by doing systemctl start homebackup (the service is called homebackup.service and the timer is called homebackup.timer) The script definitely ran -- I can tell because one of my Windows VMs is running right now and the disklist for Amanda got updated to exclude the running VM, the logic to do which is only contained in this script. Both VMs were down overnight when he last real backup was performed, so both VMs were included in the last backup. Ergo, this run of the script changed the amanda disk list. Ergo, it ran. But there is no my_script.<anything> in /tmp... WhaFu? I copied the line you put in your email into my script exactly, and then spent a while with the man page so I could understand what it was doing, and I think it should have worked... but it didn't. The script takes a couple of seconds to run (when the call to amdump is commented out, it would take a good couple of hours otherwise) so further evidence it is doing something... In the meantime, I have had another idea which I suspect will work... I'm proposing to dump my user-local configuration of fetchmail, and copy my .fetchmailrc to /etc/fetchmailrc (said file does not currently exist on my machine), making sure permissions and ownership are appropriate of course, and then modify /etc/default/fetchmail to set START_DAEMON=yes instead of no, then add a "set daemon 900" line to the copied /etc/fetchmailrc, and let the systemwide fetchmail handle my mail fetching. This is already set up as a systemd service and runs automatically on boot, so I can then modify my script to do systemctl stop fetchmail to stop it and systemctl start fetchmail to start it again at the end of my script, just like I am doing with mysql. Given that mysql is being correctly stopped and started by that approach already in the script, I have some confidence that fetchmail will too. systemctl stop fetchmail and systemctl start fetchmail correctly stop and start it from the command line. I'd like to know if there is something wrong with that strace command, or if there is greater sensitivity than I gave it credit for to where it is put in the script, but I suspect this approach of using the systemwide fetchmail is going to nail it. Mark
