Re: Vacation (broken pipe problem)

[Matti Aarnio <mea@nic.funet.fi>]

> One of my users set up the "vacation" program (under Solaris 2.5).
> ZMailer 2.99.45 has problems with SOME of his mails but not the all.
> (I.e. I cannot reproduce the problem.)
> The tipical error messages are below.
> His .forward is:
> 
> \prichter
> "|/usr/bin/vacation prichter"
> 
> Do you have any idea?

	Yes, this is the main reason behind the bundled vacation
	program.  Perhaps the installation system should sense the
	system vacation binary location and behaviour, and replace
	it with $MAILBIN/vacation (or symlink to it, thereof).

	Problem is that most vacation programs just read the headers
	of the message, and stop reading the input of the rest, and
	mailbox program becomes upset about that in case the message
	has not been written completely into the pipe. ( Pipe buffer
	size is 8 kB at Solaris systems, I think.  Test with larger
	messages -- 40k+ bodies. )

	Perhaps the sendmail does ignore the pipe-write errors, when
	the subprocess exit code is zero ?  (And thus the standard
	vacation program can get away with it ?)

> Regards
> 
> Gabor
> 
> This is a collection of reports about email delivery
> process concerning a message you originated:
> 
> <local pipe.prichter "|/usr/bin/vacation prichter" 524>: ...\
> 	expired after 3 hours, problem was:
> 	message write to "/usr/bin/vacation prichter" failed: Broken pipe
> <local pipe.prichter "|/usr/bin/vacation prichter" 524>: ...\
> 	expired after 3 hours, problem was:
> 	message write to "/usr/bin/vacation prichter" failed: Broken pipe
> 
> or
> 
> This is a collection of reports about email delivery
> process concerning a message you originated:
> 
> <local pipe.prichter "|/usr/bin/vacation prichter" 524>: message write to "/usr/bin/vacation prichter" failed: Broken pipe
> <local pipe.prichter "|/usr/bin/vacation prichter" 524>: message write to "/usr/bin/vacation prichter" failed: Broken pipe
>