Subject: slow pine, solved!!

From: Bruno Boettcher <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 5 Sep 1996 19:11:26 +0200 (MET DST)

Thanks to the unknown with his slow imap connections (mail lost in
excitement...).

I moved all symbolic hostnames out of my pinerc and substituted them with
internet numbers, and inbox scan is as fast as hell....

ciao
bboett

---

From: Mike Brudenell <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 6 Sep 1996 12:27:41 +0100 (BST)

The following may explain the effect you are seeing, and give you a way of
improving connection speed without having to resort to the time-bomb of
using numeric IP addresses...

When Pine is configured to use IMAP for mail access it can open the
connection in one of two ways: preauthenticated and unauthenticated.

The former uses a clever technique to avoid you having to enter your
username and password, but requires a small amount of configuration by the
System Manager.

Obviously the preauthenticated method is desirable to users, and so is
tried first by Pine.  If it fails (after a number of seconds) Pine then
reverts to opening an unauthenticated connection and then prompting you to
type in the authentication information.

The delay you are experiencing could well be due to Pine attempting the
preauthenticated connection, failing after timing out, and then switching
to the other sort.  (Although why changing the machine name to a numeric
IP address enclosed in square brackets changes the behaviour I confess I
don't know.)

If this is indeed your problem then there you have two choices: persuade
your System Manager to get preauthenticated connections working (which
would save you having to type in your username and password each time); or
tell Pine not to try the preauthenticated connection (which you know will
always fail) and just open an unauthenticated connection straightaway.

To allow preauthenticated connections the System Manager must, on the IMAP
server computer, create a link so that "/etc/rimapd" links to the real
imapd program.  The next thing is for users to be able to link to the IMAP
computer using the "rsh" command.  This can be done by the System Manager
for everyone by creating a "hosts.equiv" file, or by each user creating a
".rhosts" file on the IMAP computer.  Seek advice before doing either of
these, because if you get it wrong it can open up your username/system to
others.

The other alternative -- to bypass the attempt at opening a
preauthenticated connection -- is achieved very simply by slightly
altering the connection information in your Pine Setup Configuration
screen.  In the example given in the original message change

	inbox-path={imap.domain.fr/user=chris}inbox

to

	inbox-path={imap.domain.fr:143/user=chris}inbox

By supplying the IMAP port number explicitly (rather than leaving it to
the default) you are telling Pine that you ALWAYS want it to open a
connection to the (unauthenticated) IMAP service there.  It stops Pine
first trying the preauthenticated method.

This should substantially increase connection speed for you whilst
retaining the meaningful textual IP names.  However you will still have to
type in your username and password.

Cheers,

-- 
Mike Brudenell                                         <[email-masked]>
------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Computing Service, University of York, Heslington, York, YO1 5DD, UK
Tel: +44-1904-433811  FAX: +44-1904-433740  http://www.york.ac.uk/~pmb1/

On Thu, 5 Sep 1996, Christophe Harbine wrote:

> 
> 			Hello,
> 
> 	We are running unix pine 3.95 as imap client on both sunOS 4.1.3
> and Solaris 2.5. Our IMAP server is a P133 under FreeBSD. We are facing
> the following problem :
> 
> 	We have tried the 2 following syntaxes in .pinerc on client side :
> 
> 1.	inbox-path={imap.domain.fr/user=chris}inbox
> 
> 2.	inbox-path={[192.45.233.7]/user=chris}inbox
> 
> 
> 	On client side under SunOS, with the first syntax, we need about
> 30 seconds until we get the password prompt ( message 'Opening "INBOX"' ).
> With the second syntax, it's very quick ( 1 second or 2 ).
> 
> 	On client side under Solaris, opening the mailbox is very slow (
> about 30 seconds ) with both syntaxes in .pinerc !...
> 
> 	Certainly a problem with name resolving on client and/or server
> side ?... Has anyone already faced this problem ? Any idea ?...
> 
> 	Thanks for your help.
> 
> Amicalement,    /\
> Christophe     /  \/\    ---------------------------------------------
>               /   /  \   Christophe Harbine     -     Centre de Calcul
>  /\      /\  / /\/    \  Universite de Savoie  -  Domaine Scientifique
> /  \/\  /  \/\/   /\     73376 Le Bourget du Lac Cedex     -    France
> /\    \/     /   /\ \    Tel: (33) 79 75 87 54 - FAX: (33) 79 75 88 55
>   \    \    /   /  \/\   ---------------------------------------------
> 
>

---

From: [email-masked] (Stephen Balbach)
Date: 7 Sep 1996 19:00:44 GMT

In article <[email-masked]>,
>internet numbers, and inbox scan is as fast as hell....

If you dont have IN-ADDR setup in DNS and your running TCP wrappers you'll
get slow response. Replacing the name with a number will solve the
symptom. Best to setup IN-ADDR as this slow response will manifest in
other aplications as well.

explorer2:[/opt3/stephen] nslookup 192.45.233.7

*** explorer2.clark.net can't find 192.45.233.7: Non-existent domain

--
---
Stephen Balbach  "Driving the Internet To Work"
VP, ClarkNet     due to the high volume of mail I receive please quote
[email-masked]   the full original message in your reply.

---

From: Jim Lellman <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 6 Sep 1996 10:16:01 -0500

> internet numbers, and inbox scan is as fast as hell....

But I noticed your catchy return address... ;-)

Smilin' Jim

---

From: Bruno Boettcher <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 10 Sep 1996 09:37:22 +0200 (MET DST)

> But I noticed your catchy return address... ;-)
ehm, yes i was a bit too enthusiastic... running :%s/erm1/130.... on
.pinerc appeared not to be the best idea. I swapped userdomain again to
symbolic name....

In fact the problem resided on one side on the slow dns-response and on the
other side on the failed rsh attempt. On my system I use ssh with a symbolic
link named rsh, as a fallback i keeped old rsh...
while ssh doesn't produce disturbing output when summoned, old rsh does....

Now I changed my /etc/profile to work with old rsh and moved old rsh to a
new location replacing it with a link to ssh, since i like the idea of
encryption....

BTW i didn't find the compile option specifying the location of rsh...
what happens if there isn't /usr/bin/rsh?

Another question: when pine runs long time, now less than before i get
inbox access errors. Interestingly pine trys to open that box even when i
am scanning the other boxes, resulting in lots of errors. Is this behaviour
normal? (The inbox too is on my smtp server...). Other point the errors
occur only in long runs, if i close pine and start another session then no
error occur....

ciao
bboett