Subject: Pine and NFS problem

From: Randy Jay Yarger <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 22 Oct 1995 19:58:03 -0400

I have an account which is NFS exported from Machine 1 (a black NeXT) to 
Machine 2 (AIX 4.1).  The account is exported read-write and the uids and 
groupd match on both machines, so I have no problem manipulating files 
while logged into Machine 2.

Pine works from from Machine 1, but from Machine 2 it hangs while trying 
to open or write to any folder, including Fcc:.  I lists the folders 
fine, and will "open" empty folders, but anything that's not empty will 
cause it to hang.

After killing the pine process, I've noticed that it creates a 
folder.lock file on whatever folder was being opened.  The .pine-debug 
files show nothing unusual, just (when trying to open a folder called 
"jason"):

----
About to open folder "jason"  inbox: "INBOX"  
Close - saved inbox state: max 0 
end_signals(1) 

** Received SIGTERM **                   <--- when I killed the process
----

Any ideas?

Thanks,
Randy Jay Yarger | Department of Physics, Michigan State University
[email-masked] | http://hs1.hst.msu.edu/randy/randy.html

---

From: Mark Crispin <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 22 Oct 1995 23:50:43 -0700

Congratulations.  You have an unsupported NFS configuration!

You see, beloved AIX expects NeXT to support a pair of daemons called
rpc.statd and rpc.lockd which attempt to implement system call level file
locking over NFS.  NeXT, being BSD, does not.

AIX, being a persistant little guy, assumes that NeXT may implement it
someday, and so it hangs, waiting for NeXT to implement it.  Who knows,
maybe NEXTSTEP 4.0 will be SVR4 and have those daemons, and then AIX will
unblock.

The lock files that you see are not part of the disease.  Rather, they
represent a different locking mechanism.  It worked just fine; it's the
other locking (one which prevents two copies of Pine from stepping on each
other) which faltered.

Assuming that you really want to access mail files over NFS on SVR4 (not a
good idea, actually; IMAP works much better), what you have to do is to
disable the flock() calls (which translate to fcntl() calls on SVR4).
Doing so blows away the protection against running two Pines on the same
mail file on the local system, but c'est la vie.

Unfortunately, this is a little bit hard to do on AIX, as opposed to other
forms of SVR4 (such as Solaris), because in Pine 3.91 flock() is emulated
by an AIX C library routine.  In Pine 3.92, flock() will be emulated by a
Pine-internal routine and there is an interface to disable locking.  You
could do this yourself by dropping in the imap-3.6.BETA version of the
IMAP toolkit in place of the imap-3.5 version distributed with Pine 3.91,
but you will need to do some C hacking to get it to build.

My recommendation is not to use NFS from AIX to the NeXT, but rather to
use IMAP.  This will avoid all the problems, and give you full locking.

> [email-masked] | http://hs1.hst.msu.edu/randy/randy.html

-- Mark --

DoD #0105, R90/6 pilot, FAX: (206) 685-4045  ICBM: N 47 39'35" W 122 18'39"
Science does not emerge from voting, party politics, or public debate.

---

From: [email-masked] (Zachary H Leber)
Date: Sat, 21 Oct 1995 12:58:41 GMT

I use PINE for mail on my HP 735 running HP-UX 9.05.  I have a network mail 
server which is a DECstation running Ultrix 4.2a.  I mount the network mail
directory to /net/mail on by HP, but when I try to open my INBOX, PINE
hangs on opening.  I think it is a problem with mail locking and NFS
locking.  All of this has worked fine until recently, although I have heard
of problems like these.

If you can offer any help, please email to [email-masked].  Thanks. 

-- 
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