Subject: pine not quitting on HUP

From: Joe Brennan <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 16 Mar 94 12:20:45 EST

We are investigating a problem of Pine 3.89 processes continuing with
no tty after users are disconnected from our SunOS hosts.  Using the
.pine-debug* files we have narrowed it down to cases where people are
composing outgoing mail and then get disconnected suddenly, e.g.
telephone line noise, telnet connection dropped, turn off modem.  So
far we cannot reproduce it, so we are not certain precisely what
causes it.  Killing the pine process with a TERM signal results in a
.pine-debug file reporting that it got a HUP signal.  We think it may
have to do with signal handling in the pico code, but since we have
not found the answer yet we cannot say for sure.  The debug file of a
killed process nearly always ends the same way:

 === send called === 
IMAP 2:23 3/11 mm_log babble: Check completed
ioctl(TIOCWINSZ) failed :Bad file number
Save composition on HUP succeeded

** Received SIGHUP **

IMAP 9:23 3/11 mm_log babble: mailhub.cc.columbia.edu IMAP2bis server terminating connection
about to end_tty_driver

(9:23 is when root sent a TERM to kill this; mailhub.cc.columbia.edu
is where mail spool is, accessed using IMAP.)

I am writing to ask whether this sounds familiar to anyone.  We take
it the problem does not manifest itself at Washington.  Has anyone
else faced this?

Much more detail is available, but this may be something local to our
own system, so I'm omitting it for now, just hoping this is a known
problem to someone else or similar to one.

Thanks,

Joseph Brennan     Academic Information Systems
                   Columbia University in the City of New York
                   [email-masked]

---

From: David L Miller <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 16 Mar 1994 10:23:21 -0800 (PST)

Joe,

This was definitely a problem in earlier versions of Pine 3.8x, but the major
cause is fixed in Pine 3.89.  This is the second report of the hangs still
occurring in Pine 3.89.  In the other one there was some indication that the
session might have been suspended when (or shortly before) the connection was
dropped.  If you can figure out how to reproduce it, or get a stack trace
from a core file, please let us know! 

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, JE-20
4545 15th Ave NE, Seattle WA 98105, USA

---

From: Paul Holbrook <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 24 Mar 1994 21:55:41 -0500 (EST)

Joe Brennan reported a problem with Pine exiting properly.

Iwant to note that we've seen this problem quite freqently, on the order 
of several times per week on our system of nearly 500 accounts.  We did 
report this to the Pine folk, but since we haven't been able to replicate 
it (or even get accurate reports of when it occurs), we haven't gotten 
anywhere on getting it fixed.  All of our users are dial-up coming from 
terminal servers, so the general scenario you described of having 
connections dropped during message composition sounds quite plausible.

I encourage you to continue your investigations and report them to the 
Pine developers.  I would love to see a fix for this problem; I'm 
contemplating having a .logout file check for lingering pine processes.  
I've already got a custom script that users can run if they get a Pine 
hang.  It's a rather nasty blemish on an excellent program.

J. Paul Holbrook
CICNet Network Services Manager
[email-masked]    (313) 998-7680