Subject: Creating .pinerc for new users

From: Jeff Traigle <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 16 Feb 1994 11:57:15 -0500 (EST)

Is Pine supposed to copy the system pine.conf file to the user's .pinerc 
file the first time it is run? If so, it doesn't appear to be doing so at 
my sight for some reason. Anyone care to comment? What would be really 
nice if there was a system pine.conf file and then a copy of a .pinerc 
file that can be copied to a user's directory on the first startup. That 
way, an admin can only put those parameters that he/she feels the user 
should be messing with in the user's file.

Also, I just got through tracking down a problem with pre-authentication. 
Seems one of my users runs a small program from his .cshrc file. This 
apparently causes him to have to authenticate himself to the mail server. 
Rather annoying little quirk. I have another user who is also being 
required to authenticate, but I haven't tracked down the culprit in his 
case. I'll let you know when I do. These are both people running from 
SGIs in case anyone wants to know.
--
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
|                                 Jeff Traigle                                |
|                             Systems Administrator                           |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
|  University of Michigan               University of Michigan                |
|  College of Pharmacy                  Biophysics Research Division          |
|  Pharmacy Building, Room 1033         Chemistry Building, Room 3080         |
|  Ann Arbor  MI 48109                  Ann Arbor  MI 48109                   |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
|  [email-masked]                    Pager: (313) 617-8793                 |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+

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From: David L Miller <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 16 Feb 1994 09:45:38 -0800 (PST)

Jeff,

Pine generates a new .pinerc from internal defaults for new users and 
automatically adds any entries that were not found in the original.  This 
is to make sure that all new variables are added after upgrades.

It sounds like you are on the right track with the authentication problem. 
Manually issuing the "rsh host /etc/rimapd" can give some clues if you are
not already using that. 

Thanks for the report!

--DLM

|\ |  |\/|  David L. Miller    [email-masked]  (206) 685-6240
|/ |_ |  |  Software Engineer, Pine Development Team   (206) 685-4045 (FAX)
University of Washington, Networks & Distributed Computing
4545 15th Ave NE, Seattle WA 98105, USA

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From: Barry Cornelius <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 16 Feb 1994 17:52:32 +0000 (GMT)

> SGIs in case anyone wants to know.

There are a number of reasons why the user has to type their username and
password each time that they use Pine.  I have tracked down the following: 

(1) The .cshrc file does output to the screen, e.g., it uses the
    echo command.  The user will need to remove the appropriate 
    command(s) from the .cshrc file.

(2) The .cshrc file contains one or more of the Unix commands biff, 
    mesg, stty.  Probably the command can be moved to the .login file.

The problem also occurs if the file /etc/rimapd has not been set up on the
IMAP machine.  This would affect all users that IMAP into that machine.

The problem will also occur if the Pine code executes the wrong command
when it wants to set up a remote shell from the machine running Pine to
the IMAP machine.  For example, if the code says that the remote shell
command is /usr/bin/rsh when in fact the command on the machine running
Pine is /usr/ucb/rsh or /usr/bin/remsh.  Note that both of these would
affect all users of Pine on the machine running Pine. 

If other people know of any more reasons, then I would be interested to
see them.  I also think it would be useful if this information were 
included in the intended FAQ. 

I think some of our users believe that user-authentication is a part of
the way in which Pine works, because it has always done that whenever they
use Pine.  It would be nice to have more ammunition to dispel this rumour. 

--
Barry Cornelius                            Durham (091 or +44 91) 374 4717
Information Technology Service,                IT Service Office: 374 2892
University of Durham, Durham.                                Fax: 374 3741
DH1 3LE, UK                           E-mail: [email-masked]

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From: Jeff Traigle <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 16 Feb 1994 13:12:54 -0500 (EST)

Just found the problem with the other user's setup. His .cshrc file was 
missing an endif. Found it by trying to manually run rimapd with rsh as 
suggested earlier.