efa-project.org

I notice that, when upgrading EFA, you're advised to stop the mail service during this process. Now, 3.0.0.9 introduced service monitoring.

If any services are down, an e-mail message "EFA Monitor Alert" gets generated and the service is started. Unfortunately this message isn't documented and it's not obvious where it originates.

After some digging, I see that instead of coming from a daemon (that one could stop), it comes from a cron task.

Now, just to be clear, does this mean that, during EFA upgrades, it's actually impossible now to stop the mail services as suggested? Looking at the script (/usr/sbin/EFA-Monitor-cron) there is no way to flag that you actually want services stopped (until further notice, until reboot, for a specified duration etc) so any attempt to stop mail services (e.g. if you find a serious misconfiguration and want to minimise damage) will fail.

I feel that I should at the very least add the message to the wiki, for anyone else wondering where these messages originate. Before I do so, I would like to be clear that I'm not missing something here in terms of being able to control the service.

Daniel,

In EFA-Configure menu, there is an option to enter "Maintenance Mode" so that you can suspend EFA Monitor alerts and auto recovery.

normally i wouldnt dig up an old thread, but i was doing research on what maintenance mode was really for (or did) this morning. i would like to see maintenance mode actually put the EFA out of service. aside from stopping alerts, id also like to see it stop incoming connections, drain the remaining mail queue, prep for actual maintenance.

At the moment it's more like the Cyberman volume knob

Pain!