Cor Bosman <cor(_at_)xs4all(_dot_)net> writes:
Hi all. We seem to be having a very annoying problem with procmail (3.10).
We have an internal alias with about 40 people. 5 of those are using
procmail mostly to archive and split incoming mail.
We continuously see the following happen.
...
<mailq output>
...
Email to certain users on this specific alias gets stuck in procmail.
It looks as if there is a deadlock. One procmail gets stuck, and all
the others will hang too after that. I have to manually kill the
procmail processes for it to continue. This is on a solaris 2.5
box. Anyone seen this before and has any idea what might be wrong?
If it happens with only a particular set of users, I would suggest
you make sure of those users specifies a LOGFILE and turns on VERBOSE
in their .procmailrc. Then, next time it happens, examine the problem
users procmail logfile to see where the procmail processes are hanging.
My guess is that there's something broken in the locking somewhere,
perhaps due to locking a file across NFS. For example, I've heard
reports that sgi's NFS version 3 implementation doesn't include the
version 4 of the locking protocol, and that this causes problems when
locking from suns to sgis (I personally cannot confirm or refute
this). Did you specify a diverse enough set of directories for the
locking tests when you (or whoever) installed procmail? We're using
procmail 3.11pre4 as the local delivery agent here on a Solaris 2.5
machine and it's using just dotlocking and fcntl().
If you're groping for ideas then you could use "truss -p" to trace a
hanging procmail process. Just give it the pid of the *oldest*
procmail process (that's the one that's presumably holding up the
others) and it should show you what it's is hanging in, but I'd take
a look at the locking methods before this.
(Time for my semi-annual .sig inclusion I guess...)
Philip Guenther
----------------------------------------------------------------
Philip Guenther UNIX Systems and Network Administrator
Internet: guenther(_at_)gac(_dot_)edu Voicenet: (507) 933-7596
Gustavus Adolphus College St. Peter, MN 56082-1498
"His eyes were cold. As cold as the bitter winter snow that was falling
outside. Yes, cold and therefore difficult to chew,..."