Linux-1.3.68 - "Greased Turkey"

news (news@inka.de)
Thu, 22 Feb 96 12:18 MET


Newsgroups: linux.dev.kernel
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From: olaf@inka.de (Olaf Titz)
Subject: Re: kernel or sendmail problems ?
Date: 22 Feb 1996 11:18:53 GMT
References: <v02140a07ad4f9ddf3508@[130.227.158.132]>
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Organization: INKA e.V., Karlsruhe

Povl H. Pedersen <pope@edunet.dk> wrote:
> Once in a while peoples mailbox in /usr/spool/mails gets screwed up.
> It will then contain (512 or 1024?) '\0' in the beginning of the file,
> making it unuseable for my popper (the one from Qualcomm).
> Does anybody know if this is a kernel or a sendmail or a popper problem ?

Surely looks like a mailbox locking problem - two processes writing the same
mailbox file at once. The most likely culprits are a broken pop daemon, or a
broken sendmail setup, or a broken procmail/deliver/whatever-post-sendmail-
processing setup (if you use that), or an interaction between sendmail etc.
and the pop daemon, where they don't agree on a locking scheme (more about
that can be found in the procmail docs).

olaf

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