Subject: Pine, AIX, and lock-ups

From: [email-masked] (Doug Sewell)
Date: 1 Aug 1994 15:45:41 GMT

I've installed V3.89 of pine on AIX 3.2.2.  I'll say up front that I don't
use pine, I installed it because my newer users wanted something "better"
or "easier" than elm/vi... but with the problems I'm having, neither they
nor I are convinced (one of them is ready to go back to the mainframe for
e-mail, she's at least sympathetic to the problems).

When I first installed pine, my users were having serious lock-up problems.
With the assistance of Jeff Scarborough ([email-masked]) I
put a patch on C-Client's bezerk.c to make it less vulnerable to AIX xlc
problems, and Pine doesn't lock up when they go to read e-mail.

Replies (or composing new outgoing e-mail) is another story.  Users pick the
letter they want to reply to, press 'r' to reply, the header is all filled
in, and they go to the text area and it freezes.  Ctl-Q and Ctl-C don't help,
I usually have to kill -HUP their process.

This particularly happens to users on high-speed modems through a terminal
server, but occasionally to users running FTP Software telnet over ethernet
as well.

How can I find out what's going on ?  Set a higher debug level ?  Start
using Pine for myself ?  What do I look for ?  Any suggestions (dumping AIX
isn't a viable one, sorry) ?

-- 
Doug Sewell ([email-masked])          Left alle... what ?!
http://cc.ysu.edu/1/doug
The internet is like a box of chocolates -- Tom Limoncelli

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From: [email-masked] (Doug Sewell)
Date: 1 Aug 1994 17:23:43 GMT

First, I've set pine to be my default mail reader-sender.  This way perhaps
I'll see what problems people are having...

I wrote:

: When I first installed pine, my users were having serious lock-up problems.
: With the assistance of Jeff Scarborough ([email-masked]) I
: put a patch on C-Client's bezerk.c to make it less vulnerable to AIX xlc
: problems, and Pine doesn't lock up when they go to read e-mail.

: Replies (or composing new outgoing e-mail) is another story.  Users pick the
: letter they want to reply to, press 'r' to reply, the header is all filled
: in, and they go to the text area and it freezes.  Ctl-Q and Ctl-C don't help,
: I usually have to kill -HUP their process.

One observation so far, but it seems more relevant to retrieving mail from
the mailbox than replying to it:

Since pine is not setgid mail, it cannot create <userid>.lock in the mail
spool directory, /usr/spool/mail.  This lock-file is created if pine is run
as root, but not otherwise. 

Based on my experience with elm, there's a lot of futzing around involved
before I can make pine setgid mail.  I've not looked at making /usr/spool/mail
world-writable with the sticky-bit set - that's how /tmp and /var/tmp are
set up on this machine.