Subject: Re: NFS mounting /usr/mail on hp

From: David L Miller <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 1 Jul 1994 22:28:08 -0700 (PDT)

Actually, an NFS mounted /usr/mail is a sure source of problems.  We 
strongly recommend using IMAP for remote folder access and especially for 
remote INBOX access.  The usual source of lock related hangs is a stuck 
rpc.lockd on the server...

|\ |  |\/|  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

On 29 Jun 1994, Noel Hunter wrote:

> I have tried to NFS mount the /usr/mail directory on an HP9000 running 
> hp-ux 9.0.  The Pine tech notes imply that this shold work fairly well, 
> however, whenever I try to run pine on the mounted file system, it 
> simply hangs up forever, and has to be killed from another session.  it 
> then becomes a "zombie" process.
> 
> The problem seems to have something to do with file locking.  When pine 
> hangs up, the mail file cannot be accessed even after the /usr/mail area 
> is unmounted.  I had to rename the file and copy over the contents before 
> pine would open it again.  I checked for lock files, and find only the 
> .\usr\mail\username file.  Deleting it has no effect.
> 
> Any recommendations about how to get this to work will be 
> greatly appreciated. 
> 
> --
> * Noel Hunter,  Academic Systems Administrator,    Wake Forest University *
> * email: [email-masked]                            http://www.wfu.edu/~noel *
> 
>

---

From: [email-masked] (jeffery sumler)
Date: Mon, 4 Jul 1994 08:21:46 GMT

In article <[email-masked]>,
>Actually, an NFS mounted /usr/mail is a sure source of problems.  We 

Just to cast a different light on this topic, we ran an email service
with pine 3.07 (and several other unix mailers) using two HP 735s, one
an NFS server that exported /usr/mail and the other a client that
mounted /usr/mail (on /usr/mail, naturally :) We had no problems like
those Noel has described during the 9 month production run of the
service. 

The key is indeed to make sure that rpc.lockd and rpc.statd (as well as
rpc.mountd and portmap) are behaving as they should. You should double
check /etc/netnfsrc against /etc/inetd.conf to make sure they agree on
what services are being started by whom. We also modified pine slightly
so that pine's lock files were created in a directory called
/usr/mail/.locks - this prevented the problem of pine creating locks in
the /tmp directory of both machines and thus made life a little easier
for both users and sysadmins like myself ;)

jeff sumler
[email-masked]

---

From: [email-masked] (Jack Valko)
Date: 4 Jul 1994 15:31:04 -0700

I can second this.  I tried to NFS mount /usr/mail and sendmail gagged.
Definitely lock file problems.  

Jack

David L Miller ([email-masked]) wrote:

: Actually, an NFS mounted /usr/mail is a sure source of problems.  We 
: strongly recommend using IMAP for remote folder access and especially for 
: remote INBOX access.  The usual source of lock related hangs is a stuck 
: rpc.lockd on the server...

: |\ |  |\/|  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

: On 29 Jun 1994, Noel Hunter wrote:

: > I have tried to NFS mount the /usr/mail directory on an HP9000 running 
: > hp-ux 9.0.  The Pine tech notes imply that this shold work fairly well, 
: > however, whenever I try to run pine on the mounted file system, it 
: > simply hangs up forever, and has to be killed from another session.  it 
: > then becomes a "zombie" process.
: > 
: > The problem seems to have something to do with file locking.  When pine 
: > hangs up, the mail file cannot be accessed even after the /usr/mail area 
: > is unmounted.  I had to rename the file and copy over the contents before 
: > pine would open it again.  I checked for lock files, and find only the 
: > .\usr\mail\username file.  Deleting it has no effect.
: > 
: > Any recommendations about how to get this to work will be 
: > greatly appreciated. 
: > 
: > --
: > * Noel Hunter,  Academic Systems Administrator,    Wake Forest University *
: > * email: [email-masked]                            http://www.wfu.edu/~noel *
: > 
: >

---

From: [email-masked] (Noel Hunter)
Date: 5 Jul 1994 13:30:04 GMT

: David L Miller ([email-masked]) wrote:
: : Actually, an NFS mounted /usr/mail is a sure source of problems.  We 
: : strongly recommend using IMAP for remote folder access and especially for 
: : remote INBOX access.  The usual source of lock related hangs is a stuck 
: : rpc.lockd on the server...
: : |\ |  |\/|  David L. Miller    [email-masked]  (206) 685-6240
: : |/ |_ |  |  Software Engineer, Pine Development Team   (206) 685-4045 (FAX)

Thanks for the information.  You might want to change the wording in the 
documentation (pine technical notes), which implies that Pine works 
fairly well over NFS mounts is no other mail readers are in use.

I think imap would be a better way for me to do this-- but I have not 
been able to figure out exactly how to set up rimap to eliminate the need 
for entering passwords.

Assuming my hosts and hosts.equiv'ed, and I have a link between imapd and
/etc/rimapd, what else do I need to do?  I pointed inetd.conf at the link,
but it still asked for passwords.

Thanks again for your help.

Noel

---

From: "Richard C. Gaine" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 5 Jul 1994 11:41:10 -0400 (EDT)

Hello,
	I have a pine question.  What other type of question would I mail 
to this list?

	When our primary name server goes down it takes pine such a long 
time to execute.  Why is this, and is there a way to correct it?  We have 
ping using an smtp server, but even though the server name is in our 
/etc/hosts file and if we usent e ip address it still takes pine much to 
long to load if our name server is down.

Rick Gaine

---

From: David L Miller <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 5 Jul 1994 08:51:03 -0700 (PDT)

If you manually invoke rimapd (e.g. "rsh servername /etc/rimapd") the 
problem is often readily apparent...

Using rimap, inetd is completely out of the picture, so the inetd.conf 
setting does not matter in that case.

---

From: [email-masked] (Jim Davis)
Date: 5 Jul 1994 10:37:54 -0700

In article <[email-masked]>,
Richard C. Gaine <[email-masked]> wrote:
:
:	When our primary name server goes down it takes pine such a long 
:time to execute.  Why is this, and is there a way to correct it?

It looks like pine at startup tries to get the hostname of the machine
that it is executing on (i.e., calls gethostname() on a SunOS machine,
calls systeminfo(SI_HOSTNAME) on a Solaris 2.3 machine).  If your
local system is configured to look at the DNS instead of /etc/hosts
for the hostname info and you have multiple nameservers specified in
your /etc/resolv.conf, then if the first nameserver listed doesn't
respond, the resolver routines will wait a while before trying the
next nameserver listed.  So what you're probably seeing at startup is
the lag time before the resolver routines give up on the first
nameserver and move on to the next one.

You could avoid that by having your resolver routines look in
/etc/hosts before consulting the DNS (though that's a debatable
strategy in general).