Subject: Problem with pine on a distributed environment

From: [email-masked] (Craig Werner)
Date: Sun, 10 Dec 1995 13:15:54 GMT

Hello, everyone.  I am having trouble performing operations, such as 
deleting messages, within folders of pine running on a distributed 
environment, and I understand the problem is with the system's 
inability to establish a proper lock file.
 
One of the systems to which I have access (not the beautifully-run one 
from which this post comes) runs in a distributed environment.  When a 
user calls pine, the system performs an IMAP login to the user drive 
on which the pine mailbox folders are located.  However, all the other 
pine folders are on whichever drive the user's account is on.  
Consequently, my sysadmin tells me, when a user wants to perform an 
operation on a folder other than the mailbox one, unless he is logged 
on to the user drive on which his account lives, it fails because pine 
can't establish a proper lock file.
 
I am wondering if there is a way of using pine in such a distributed 
environment so that it will work with its full folder functionality.  
My sysadmin tells me he once tried to get an answer from this group, 
but his queries went unanswered.  Can someone point me towards some 
documentation that will help solve this problem?  My sysadmin is 
swamped and would rather not devote time to the problem, so I'm taking 
it upon myself to see if there is an easy fix.
 
Thanks for all help.
 
Craig Werner <[email-masked]>

---

From: [email-masked] (Barry Bouwsma)
Date: 10 Dec 1995 18:49:16 GMT

In a previous article, [email-masked] (Craig Werner) says:

>When a 

    This is only giving you half of the flexibility IMAP can provide.

>can't establish a proper lock file.

    Not quite understanding exactly what you mean, I can think of two
known problems.  If the machines share the folders/home directories with
NFS, file locking is hopelessly broken.  This should just mean that two
programs attempting an operation on the same folder aren't aware of each
other, so if one makes a change, the other sort of shrieks about it.
    The other possibility is that the folders are local to the machine
from which you are logged in and not shared.  This would mean they are
only visible when you're on that machine.

>environment so that it will work with its full folder functionality.  

    Sure there is, but it requires a central location for the folders,
which shouldn't be too difficult to arrange, and the advantages of which
ought to outweigh the time needed to set it up.

    The particular solution will depend on your situation.  Does your
IMAP INBOX server also have access to your folders?  Then configure Pine
so all folder references are not to the local machine ( mail/[] and so on)
but to the IMAP host with these folders ( {imaphost}mail/[] and so on).
This also works for postponed messages, so you can move between machines
and pick up where you left off.  This is easy enough for you to do from
the configuration screen; the sysadmin need only modify the pine.conf file
to enable this for all users.
    (Note that this does not work for everything, such as addressbooks,
and IMSP with IMAP4 addresses this.)
    If a different machine is the primary store for your folders, then
substitute that machine name for the IMAP host, assuming those machines
are running an IMAP server.

    Using IMAP to access the mail folder works around file locking problems
associated with other access methods, and it can work successfully with a
minimum of effort.  (I use it.)

    It is assumed that all mail folders are in a directory (mail or Mail)
in the user's home directory.  If you want both incoming mail and the mail
folders to be on a machine users do not typically log into, and have no
real need for them to be in the user's home directory, then an IMAP4
server such as the CMU Cyrus server provides this functionality.

>Can someone point me towards some 
>documentation that will help solve this problem?

    The best I can say is that the IMAP access format used by Pine works
for folders as well as the INBOX, so by changing this, you'll be using IMAP.

-- 
 Barry Bouwsma, Mendel University Brno, Czech Republic -- I Still Have No Life
Flash!  Seeking work with computers over winter in Czech or Slovak Republic...
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