Re: Zmailer and Majordomo troubles

[Oliver Xymoron <oxymoron@waste.org>]

On Tue, 19 Mar 1996, Matti Aarnio wrote:

> > On Tue, 19 Mar 1996, Matti Aarnio wrote:
> > > 	Hmm..  Add "majordomo" into group "zmailer" at /etc/groups.
> > > 	That should do it by making Majordomo to be a "trusted" sender,
> > > 	which can "fake" emails by free fill..
> > 
> > Ok, that's the first I've seen of the zmailer group, I just had to create
> > it, is there anything else, users or files, that should be in that group? 
> 
> 	Depends..  I have:
> 		mea,daemon,root
> 	at couple servers, but at my workstation I have none.
> 	The "daemon" is needed (for error reports to be "faked" at will..)

Ok, this seems to be working, but only time (and error messages) will tell.
 
> > > > And I'm still having a nagging problem with mailbox not preserving 
> > > > accessed time so user's new mail isn't reported. 
> 
> 	I am afraid it has something to do with the way how Linux handles
> 	inode attribute management.  Especially UPDATE management..
> 
> 	I will ask about it in the Linux kernel forum.  (browsing kernel
> 	source just tells me that it is prone to do surprises..  It looks
> 	to me that a file open for RDWR will always be updated both atime,
> 	and mtime even if only really written to..)
> 
> 	Perhaps this will help:  (I am now assuming that file lock dissolving,
> 	and closeing will not cause mtime/atime to be updated, but one never
> 	knows, until it is confirmed either way..)

I built a new mailbox with this patch against 2.99.26 and still have the 
same behaviour. I'm afraid I'm not terribly familiar with how access time 
is supposed to work - if you could describe a sequence of open, read, 
write, close, or whatever that you expect to work, I could write a quick 
C or Perl app to test this behaviour on my system. I wrote a perl script 
earlier today to stat a file, do some operation on, and then restore its 
access time, which proved successful - any way I could turn something 
like this into a wrapper for mailbox?
--
 "Love the dolphins," she advised him. "Write by W.A.S.T.E.."