The mailing list for listmasters using Sympa

[Donjan Rodic <address@concealed>]

Running an Ubuntu 14.04 server with a fairly default setup, Sympa, MySQL 
and exim4 (with added transport scripts) from repos.
When rebooting (after a kernel upgrade), Sympa fails by spamming 
listmasters with:

  No DataBase
  Cannot connect to database sympa, still trying...

After that it's not distributing any mail, though 'ps -ef|grep sympa' 
shows the 5 processes (bounced.pl etc).
The Ubuntu-specific 'service sympa restart' seems to have trouble 
stopping the daemon, and (possibly Ubuntu-specific) likewise:

# /etc/init.d/sympa restart
# * Stoping Sympa mailing list manager       [ OK ]
# * Some daemons failed to be stopped (not running?): sympa             
[fail]

However, a simple:
/etc/init.d/sympa stop
/etc/init.d/sympa start
fixes mailing lists once the server is up.

So far I'm very happy with Sympa (upgraded recently from Mailman), but 
while manually restarting the Sympa daemon (or having a clunky sleep in 
rc.local) is a workaround, I hope there is a more elegant and 
dependency-based option without generating the error messages during boot?

Best Wishes
Donjan