Bug#810938: exim4-daemon-light: Cannot assign requested address: daemon abandoned at each startup

[Marc Haber]

On Fri, Jan 15, 2016 at 11:33:04PM +0100, Manuel Bilderbeek wrote:
> On 14-01-16 23:55, Marc Haber wrote:
> >On Thu, Jan 14, 2016 at 11:13:34PM +0100, Manuel Bilderbeek wrote:
> >>I have no idea what to investigate and how.
> >
> >Check whether you have ::1 and/or 127.0.0.1 on lo.
> 
> /etc/networks has:
> loopback        127.0.0.0
> 
> Not sure how to check this in detail, I never had to do this in 15
> years of using Debian.

You have never used ifconfig or ip addr show to see which IP addresse
you have configured?

> >Stop exim.
> >Use netstat to see who is listening on port 25.
> 
> Interesting:
> 
> sonata at 23:17:~$ sudo /etc/init.d/exim4 stop
> [ ok ] Stopping exim4 (via systemctl): exim4.service.
> sonata at 23:17:~$ sudo netstat -napt | grep :25
> tcp        0      0 127.0.0.1:25            0.0.0.0:* LISTEN
> 8769/exim4
> 
> Although I stop it, it's still running...?

On a system with systemd as PID 1 you should not call init scripts
directly, but use systemctl instead.

Actually, you shouldn't run init scripts directly even on a sysvinit
system, you should use service(1) to do that.

> Looks like it's already started then, outside of systemd... what
> could it be?

The Debian exim4 packages do not use systemd yet, they still use
traditional sysv init scripts.

> As I said before, even though it gives that error, it is still able
> to send the e-mail that the paniclog has grown. I guess that can be
> explained by the fact that there was already an exim4 running
> indeed.

No. Please read the docs about exim4 and how it works, such as, for
example, /usr/share/doc/exim4-base/spec.txt.gz chapter 3. You don't
need a running daemon to send mail.

> Is it possible this has to do with the automatic removal of
> 'ifupdown'? It started when installing/upgrading several packages as
> listed in my original report.

Probably not, you're the only one with that issue.

> >For basic Unix administration skills, you might want to refer to the
> >relevant -user mailing lists.
> 
> Do you really think that's a helpful remark?

Yes. This is with utmost certainty not a bug in exim. By asking your
questions in a bug report against exim and thus only to the exim4
maintainers, you're depraving yourself of 99.9% of people who would
be able and willing to help.

Greetings
Marc

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