Thanks to everyone who responded to my questions about a
problem where the From line was getting corrupted. Here
I tell what was the real problem.
To recap, when our Caldera OpenLinux 1.1 system received
multiple email messages very quickly, some messages would
get multiple F's on the from line and then subsequent
messages would be missing the F's.
Most responses said that it sounded like a file locking
problem. Suggested solutions were to get the latest version
of procmail or recompile our version so that it would look
at the file locking mechanisms.
The funny thing was that three systems with new installs
didn't exhibit the problem.
The file locking recommendation eventually led to the real
problem. On a good system I would run our spam script (we
spammed ourselves to trigger the problem) and everything
would work. Using top I would see multiple instances of
procmail running. Looking at the directory where the spool
files were, I would see a spool_file.lock file get created
and then go away.
Finally, I did the exact same thing on the system that
wouldn't work. There I would see the multiple instances
of procmail running but no lock file being created. I
said to myself "Now that I know what is happening, the
question is why."
It turned out to be a permission problem on the spool
directory. On the system that worked, the permissions
were rwxrwxr-x with the owner being root and the group
being mail. On the system that didn't work, the
permissions were rwxr-xr-x with the owner and group
being root. This meant that procmail, which is run as
mail couldn't write the directory file. We changed
the broken system to rwxrwxr-x with owner root and
group mail. The problem disappeared.
As I said, the suggestions about lock files were key.
It guided our investigation until we found the real
problem. I thank everyone who responded.
I've seen other posting about corruption of the From
line. Perhaps you have the same problem.
Jeff
--
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// Jeffrey S. Gilton Castle Computer, Inc //
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