Subject: further delays

From: Niklas Johannes Saers <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 20 Mar 2003 14:12:43 +0100 (MET)

Hi, I've tracked the problem down to being /usr/local/libexec/mlock.
With roughly 200 users on my system, I've now got heaps of those processes
hanging around. i.e:

clemens 25891  0.0  0.2   888  520  p2  SN    2:05PM   0:00.07 /usr/local/libexec/mlock 3 /var/mail/clemens
cobos   25934  0.0  0.2   888  520  ??  SN    2:08PM   0:00.02 /usr/local/libexec/mlock 4 /var/mail/cobos

What I haven't found is a decent man-page on mlock. It's distributetd with
imap-uw (which I understand this is the mailinglist to be consulting). How
can I configure mlock's behaviour? What is the 3 and 4 parameters? Is it
important at all that /var/mail is a symlink to /disks/ideraid1/mail?
How can I get a more verbose output, hopefully it even telling me
where/why it's hanging?

Cheers

   Nik
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From: Niklas Johannes Saers <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 20 Mar 2003 14:18:03 +0100 (MET)

I forgot to mention: when I copy the command, it simply answers '?'. It
does not hang and it certainly does not give me a clue of what is going
on.

Cheers

  Nik

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From: Mark Crispin <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 20 Mar 2003 11:18:25 -0800 (Pacific Standard Time)

On Thu, 20 Mar 2003, Niklas Johannes Saers wrote:
> What I haven't found is a decent man-page on mlock.

mlock is an internal program.  It won't work unless it is setgid mail.

It isn't reasonable to call mlock from the shell.  The first argument is
the file descriptor of an open file; the second argument is the file name
of the file that is open on that descriptor.

mlock will use its setgid mail privilege (which should only give it access
to /var/mail) to create a .lock file.

mlock communicates via stdio with the calling program.

An alternative to debugging mlock is simply to set /var/mail's directory
protection to 1777 so you don't have to use mlock.

-- Mark --

http://staff.washington.edu/mrc
Science does not emerge from voting, party politics, or public debate.