Subject: <Fixed>: sharing mailboxes across partitions, locked out

From: Brian Alexander Todd <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 1 May 2002 11:04:31 -0400 (EDT)

Dear pine-infoers,

I wanted to post an answer to my previous Pine problem so that it will
exist in the archive.  All of the brain power in the answer is due to
Eduardo Chappa and I am just recounting the solution that he showed to me
(Thanks!).

SYMPTOM:

A Unix version of Pine stalls when accessing a folder on an msdos
partition.  After a while it goes in to

"Mailbox </msdos_partition/a_folder>, locked will override in ### seconds"

mode.  Finally it does access the folder but it takes way to long for
practical usage.

CAUSE:

I'm fuzzy on this but it has to do with the way that Pine tries to make
lock files.  If the mailbox exists on the msdos (e.g. some kind of FAT)
partition it can't set the permissions on the file (because msdos file
systems don't support permissions).  Evidently, it is hanging as it fails
to set the permissions.

FIX:

You will need to rebuild Pine and make sure that the build option CRXTYPE
is set to "std" and not to "nfs".  I changed this by editing the Makefile
in /pinesrc/imap/src/osdep/unix/.  You need to be a little careful because
there is platform dependent switches in the makefile, so make sure that
you are setting the switch in the right place (ie. for the right
platform).  A good way to verify this is by deleting the file crx_nfs.c to
make sure that you are using crx_stdc.  I believe that it is also possible
to set this option at build-time by,

./build <build_name> CRXTYPE=std <... other options>

Either way, rebuild and see if it works (it did for me).

CAUTIONARY

I have no sense of the security issues associated with this change.

OPED

Unix pine with mailboxes on a FAT partition is a sweet way to share
mailboxes across partitions on a multiboot computer.

Thanks again Eduardo,
Brian

-- 
-----------------------------------------------------------------
 For information about this mailing list, and its archives, see: 
 http://www.washington.edu/pine/pine-info/
-----------------------------------------------------------------