procmail
[Top] [All Lists]

A sad, sad state of affairs

1996-09-25 08:18:26

Hi.

I have set up a Linux 1.2.13 box to act as an Email Server for
our small lan of PCs. Formail and Procmail 3.10 do an important
job of splitting up and processing downloaded mail from our ISP
mailbox.

The sendmail version is 8.6.12 whose configuration default uses
'deliver' as its local mailer. I have been worrying about the
possibility of both deliver and procmail trying to access the 
same mailbox at the same time (never mind the possibility of
the user's Eudora trying to access as well), and this morning
Whammo!

Procmail just hung; I had to terminate it. A lock file was left
in the mail directory, the user mailbox had a single 'F' in it.

I manually removed the lock file; but the user's Eudora could
not still access the mailbox, this seemed to be corrected by
re-booted the system. Meanwhile, procmail continued to 'crash'
with lock files appearing as fast as I could get rid of them.

There is an extract from the procmail logfile :- 

procmail: Assigning "DEFAULT=/var/spool/mail/philw"
procmail: No match on "^To.*root"
procmail: No match on "^To.*postmaster"
procmail: No match on "^To.*MAILER-DAEMON"
procmail: No match on "^To.*news"
procmail: No match on "^To(_dot_)*ay25(_at_)cityscape(_dot_)co(_dot_)uk"
procmail: Match on "^To(_dot_)*elgro(_at_)cityscape(_dot_)co(_dot_)uk"
procmail: Locking "saraw.lock"
procmail: Assigning "LASTFOLDER=saraw"
procmail: Opening "saraw"
procmail: Acquiring kernel-lock
procmail: Terminating prematurely
From sales(_at_)elgro(_dot_)co(_dot_)uk  Wed Sep 25 07:59:15 1996
 Subject: Availabilities
  Folder: **Requeued**                                                     1277
procmail: Couldn't unlock "/var/spool/mail/philw.lock"
procmail: Terminating prematurely whilst waiting for a kernel-lock
From sales(_at_)elgro(_dot_)co(_dot_)uk  Wed Sep 25 09:48:44 1996
 Subject: Availabilities
  Folder: **Requeued**                                                        0
procmail: Couldn't unlock "/var/spool/mail/philw.lock"
procmail: [1882] Wed Sep 25 12:34:30 1996
procmail: Terminating prematurely
From POPmail Wed Sep 25 10:57:04 1996
 Subject: REF: Daily News Brief                                                
  Folder: **Requeued**                                                     5584
procmail: Notified comsat: "root@:**Requeued**"
procmail: Unlocking "saraw.lock"
procmail: Couldn't unlock "saraw.lock"

It's a sad, sad state of affairs.

I think the long term solution is to use procmail as the local
mailer, but I would need to upgrade my sendmail to 8.7.5 (or even
8.8.0 which is just round the corner) in order to use the 
FEATURE(local_procmail) config.

Short term? Well, I would appreciate your advice - the man pages
have a lot of stuff on lockfiles, but I am unsure (not clever
enough) about what I should be doing.

Thanks,

Phil Watkinson,
Boston, UK.


<Prev in Thread] Current Thread [Next in Thread>
  • A sad, sad state of affairs, Phil Watkinson <=