Description of problem: I have a cronjob that recently has been outputting an error every time it runs (using fetchmail): fetchmail: can't poll specified hosts with another fetchmail running at <number>. The problem is, there is definitely no other fetchmail running, and there is no stale .fetchmail.pid file lying around. To make matters more complicated, I am unable to reproduce this outside of a cronjob. Running fetchmail directly on the shell produces no error message. Here is the cron entry: */5 * * * * fetchmail myserver > /dev/null I have had no problems until the update to fetchmail-6.3.7-2.fc7, at which point the problem has occurred every time the cronjob runs. I put an strace into the cronjob (strace -o /tmp/straceout fetchmail myserver), and it shows a successful open() for reading only of .fetchmail.pid - which makes no sense as the file does not exist. I suspect that there is a threading issue or something. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): fetchmail-6.3.7-2.fc7 How reproducible: Only from the cronjob for some reason
Found the problem - for some reason, there were two crond's running. So two fetchmail instances were being started simultaneously every time. If it happens again I'll file a bug against vixie-cron instead. Apologies for the non-bug report. Closing.