Subject: INBOX error

From: Mitch Baltuch <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 26 Sep 1996 08:49:26 -0600

Hi,

We are running pine 3.95 on Solaris 2.5 and having a recurring problem.
One or more times a day, pine complains of an INBOX access error, which
can only be cleared by killing and restarting pine.  It started as we
moved our users over to CDE.  I have eliminated the AMD automounter as the
cause, and we have tried a number of kernel patches that we thought might
help.  Unfortunately, nothing seems to work.  Anyone else having this
problem, or does anyone have a solution?

Thanks,
Mitch

_______________________________________________________________________________
Mitchell S. Baltuch			   		 Unidata Program Center
Software Engineer			    Univ. Corp for Atmospheric Research
[email-masked]			      WWW: http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/
     Java Resource Page: http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/staff/mitch/java.html

---

From: Terry Gray <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 26 Sep 1996 12:51:46 -0700 (PDT)

Mitch,
Are you using IMAP or local access to the INBOXes?

-teg

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From: Mitch Baltuch <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 26 Sep 1996 14:01:19 -0600 (MDT)

> Are you using IMAP or local access to the INBOXes?

We are not using IMAP.  We are running on Sparc10's using sendmail.

Mitch

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From: David L Miller <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 26 Sep 1996 14:45:21 -0700

> We are not using IMAP.  We are running on Sparc10's using sendmail.

Are the INBOXes NFS mounted?  If so, you are probably running into
file locking failures.  Pine does the best it can, but over NFS it is
a no-win situation.  Converting to IMAP access for remote folders will
alleviate the locking problems.

FWIW, The last reports I've heard indicate that Sun will be
deprecating NFS access to mail in favor of IMAP in their next
generation of mail software... 

--DLM

-- 
|\ |  |\/|  David L. Miller    [email-masked]  (206) 685-6240
|/ |_ |  |  Software Engineer, Pine Development Team   (206) 685-4045 (FAX)
University of Washington, Networks & Distributed Computing, Box 354841
4545 15th Ave NE, Seattle WA 98105, USA

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From: Mitch Baltuch <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 26 Sep 1996 15:50:24 -0600

On Thu, 26 Sep 1996, David L Miller wrote:

> Date: Thu, 26 Sep 1996 14:45:21 -0700 (PDT)
> From: David L Miller <[email-masked]>
> To: Mitch Baltuch <[email-masked]>
> Newsgroups: comp.mail.pine
> Subject: Re: INBOX error
> 

They are NFS mounted, but I don't believe that that is the problem.  We
had others using pine on other workstations with NFS mounted spools and
they did not experience the same problem I am seeing until I switched them
over to CDE, under Solaris 2.5.  Originally, we thought it might be amd
timeouts (we use amd, rather than automounter), but we disproved that one.
It may still turn out to be lock contention, but it will probably be
caused by something other than NFS (although I have been wrong before :-).
I have pine running with -d9 set and we will see if that tells us
anything.

> generation of mail software... 

Oh goodie.  Something else to install :-).

Mitch

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From: [email-masked] (Sherwood Botsford)
Date: 26 Sep 1996 22:25:37 GMT

Mitch Baltuch ([email-masked]) wrote:
: Hi,

: We are running pine 3.95 on Solaris 2.5 and having a recurring problem.
: One or more times a day, pine complains of an INBOX access error, which
: can only be cleared by killing and restarting pine.  It started as we
: moved our users over to CDE.  I have eliminated the AMD automounter as the
: cause, and we have tried a number of kernel patches that we thought might
: help.  Unfortunately, nothing seems to work.  Anyone else having this
: problem, or does anyone have a solution?

Yes we have it here also.  I think it's something to do with the way nfs
mounted spool files work.  

I solved it by having procmail deliver everything to my mail directory.
Procmail and pine seem to be very good about keeping out of eachother's
way, and honoring file locks.

--

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