/etc/daily gives incorrect warning

[acampbell]

Every morning I see this error from /etc/daily:

Services that should be running but aren't:
cupsd

But cupsd is running (see below). After looking at the script I see that this message is coming from rcctl, and I can produce it by running rcctl manually, Something incorrectly configured?

ps ax | grep cupsd:
17154 ?? Is 0:00.03 cupsd -C /etc/cups/cupsd.conf -s /etc/cups/cups-files.conf

[jggimi]

Originally Posted by acampbell

Something incorrectly configured?

Maybe. Post the contents of /etc/rc.conf.local, that's the key file for daemon provisioning.

[acampbell]

xdm_flags=NO
pkg_scripts=cupsd

Thanks. Oddly enough, after I loaded this file and reinstalled it the error has gone away: 'rcctl. ls failed' no longer give the error!

[jggimi]

The file looks fine. I note you are not running the messagebus daemon, a component of x11/dbus. It is used for communication between X applications and CUPS.

daily(8) is a shell script. It checks for services by issuing rcctl(8) with the parameters "ls failed" to look for services which should be running, but are not.

rcctl(8) is a shell script. The "ls failed" parameters run rc.d(8) "check" commands for all started daemons. For CUPS, it will run # /etc/rc.d/cupsd check. According to rc.subr(8), this will run a pgrep(1) with the $pexp variable. For /etc/rc.d/cupsd, that's "${daemon} .*" or, when expanded, "/usr/local/sbin/cupsd .*"

[jggimi]

Looking at /etc/rc.d/rc.subr for the specific pgrep(1) command string, it's

pgrep -T "${daemon_rtable}" -q -xf "${pexp}"

[acampbell]

Thanks for these pointers. I didn't know about messagebus - I've now added it to rc.conf.local and will read up about it if I can find any documentation.

[jggimi]

You'll find provisioning guidance in /usr/local/share/doc/pkg-readmes/ and deep background on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D-Bus

[acampbell]

Thanks, that's useful.

[jggimi]

Some applications (such as Gnome) require it. Others (such as CUPS) do not require it if X is not used.