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Re: Locking problem.....



On Oct 12,  8:54pm, "Torben Nielsen" wrote:
} Subject: Locking problem.....
> I'm having some problems with zmailer and locking under Solaris 2.2. I'm using
> the current Toronto version of zmailer.
> 
> We're delivering mail directly to /home/<user name>/Inbox and we're using the
> NCD Zmail as the mail reader. For some reason, we see Zmail hanging frequently.
> The problem seems to be that there's a lock file created in /var/mail and it
> just sits there forever. Sometimes we can clear things up temporarily by
> manually removing it.
> 
> What options do I have for locking using zmailer? I'd like to do locking using
> a lock file in the users home directory. Something like Inbox.lock would be
> perfect. But I don't see how to set that. Does zmailer support any way of doing
> this?
> 
> Thanks, Torben
}-- End of excerpt from "Torben Nielsen"

An earlier version (I believe 2.2.e2) didn't create the proper lock file in
/var/mail and did cause some hanging problems as you described.
What version are you using ?

Our current version here is 2.2.e4. It uses the Solaris2.x maillock() and
mailunlock() routines which only does file locking in /var/mail. There isn't any
way now to specify an alternate location for the lock file. To do this one would
have to have the source for maillock() and mailunlock() routines or write your
own version.

I would think that in your case as long as zmailer local mailbox delivery and
the mail readers are running on the same host then you should not be
experiencing any locking problems. This is because both zmailer and the mail
reader are both using the same /var/mail directory.
The problem with improper locking arises when the /var/mail directory on the
mail reader host is differnt than the /var/mail directory on the zmailer local
mailbox delivery host.

Another option is to not use mail lockfile locking. To do this remove
MAILLOCK from hostenv/SunOS5.2. This means that you'll have to make sure that
none of your mail readers use lockfile locking.

Edwin.