Lincoln Chang <Lincoln(_dot_)Chang(_at_)sv(_dot_)sc(_dot_)philips(_dot_)com>
writes:
My procmail is: procmail v3.11pre7 1997/04/28
Locking strategies: dotlocking
and my system is:
SunOS systema 5.6 Generic_105181-06 sun4m sparc SUNW,SPARCstation-5
Hmm, that's a pretty old version of the kernel patch for 5.6, which
means you're probably behind on other patches too. You should consider
getting the latest recommended patches from
ftp://sunsolve.sun.com:/pub/patches/
1. When I open mu Sun Mailtool without closing it, then do the follwing:
% mailx -v myusername < /dev/null
"|IFS=' '&&exec /usr/bin.sun5/procmail -f-||exit 75 # myusername "...
Connecting to prog...
sometimes it just stop there, and there are msg on the console as following:
Mar 10 15:39:42 systema sendmail[887]: PAA00881: SYSERR(root): mailer prog
died with signal 13
Mar 10 15:40:02 systema sendmail[879]: PAA00878: SYSERR(root): mailer prog
died with signal 12
Under solaris 2.6, signal 12 is SIGSYS and signal 13 is SIGPIPE.
SIGSYS means that either a system library is broken or the procmail
binary is corrupt or compiled for the wrong system. Procmail catches
SIGPIPE early on, so that's another sign of a broken binary or library.
I would suggest applying all the recommended patches and making sure
you're using a current and stable compiler (if gcc, at least 2.8.1. If
Sun's cc, make sure you don't have /usr/ucb in your path, as
/usr/ucb/cc is broken). Reconfigure, recompile, reinstall.
2. The 'procmail: Couldn't unlock "mbox.lock"' msg occurrs MUCH LESS now
after I did:
1) LOCKFILE=$HOME/.lockmail
2) change ":0:" to ":0" in one of the lines in .procmailrc file.
3) use #define NO_fcntl_LOCK
#define NO_lockf_LOCK
in config.h before compiling the new version of v3.11pre7
If you turn off all kernel locking (as required by Sun's broken
MailTool), then the only thing keeping your mailboxes from being
scrambled are the lockfiles. If you tell procmail to use a single
global lockfile, then that'll protect you from multiple simultaneous
procmail's, but not from a procmail process colliding with MailTool.
Such a setup could therefore lose or corrupt messages.
But still occurrs around once per day!
Those would be the times that procmail is colliding with MailTool. My
only suggestion at this point would be to switch from MailTool to
dtmail (the CDE mail GUI) or some other mail user agent.
Philip Guenther