Subject: question about Pine

From: Susan Jarchow Van Sickle <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 27 Apr 1994 16:25:52 -0500 (CDT)

On our campus, our IBM RS/6000 computers are accessed by most users
through an Equinox Data Switch.  Connections through this switch are set
to timeout after a certain period of inactivity (30 minutes) in order to
free up ports on our RS/6000s for usage by other users. 

Our systems administrator recently noticed that some of our users had 
been in the same Pine session all day long.  Our first hypothesis as to 
how this could be the case was that these users were receiving or 
sending messages at least every 30 minutes.  In order to check this out, 
we started a Pine session, and discovered that even when no mail was 
received or sent out of a Pine session, about every 2 and a half 
minutes, our data switch sensed activity, and reset its timeout timer for 
this particular port.

Our question, then, is the following:  Does Pine send some signal to the
terminal every 2 and a half minutes?   If so, is there anyway to 
reconfigure Pine so that it doesn't do this?

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Susan VanSickle, Training Manager
Academic Computer Center                           FAX:  (913) 233-2335
Washburn University                              Voice:  (913) 231-1010
1700 College                                             Extension 1389
Topeka, KS  66621                     Internet:  [email-masked]
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From: David L Miller <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 27 Apr 1994 14:33:46 -0700 (PDT)

Susan,

Pine does a new mail check every 300 seconds.  During this check a '*' is
displayed in the upper left-hand corner of the screen.  There is currently no
way to disable this without changing the code.  Actually, I was under the
impression that most inactivity timeouts only look at the incoming line and
are thus unaffected by the spurious characters. 

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