[798] in Release_7.7_team
workstations and mail queues
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jonathon Weiss)
Mon Dec 16 17:35:07 1996
From: Jonathon Weiss <jweiss@MIT.EDU>
To: cfyi@MIT.EDU
Cc: release-team@MIT.EDU
Date: Mon, 16 Dec 1996 17:34:57 EST
I've seen some questions about the status of various bugs that cause
athena workstations to not run their sendmail queue when they should.
All messages sent using normal mail clients (including all of the mh
and rmail variants, and some other things) will go thru the sendmail
queue on the local workstation when it is sent. In the ideal case it
will only spend a few seconds there on its way to the mailhub.
However, if the mailhubs are hosed, it may get left in the local
workstations mail queue until the mailhubs are not hosed. All client
workstations *should* attempt to process their mail queue about once
an hour, although not all at the same time in the hour (of course if
the mailhubs are still hosed...) Here is (to the best of my
knowledge) the state of these problems:
SGIs will DTRT, unless they were installed after 8.0I was deployed, in which
case they will not run their mail queues.
running "crontab /srvd/var/spool/cron/crontabs/root"
will replace root's crontab, and should solve the problem.
SGIs that have not yet been updated to 8.0I may also not run their mail queues,
but in this case updating the machine to 8.0 should solve the problem.
Suns will sometimes end up with messages locked in the mail queue
(this may occur even if the mailhubs are not hosed, I'm not sure)
rebooting the machine will remove the bogus lock files
and the mail will be sent the next time the queue is run
(should happen within 2 hours (not one because of the way the machines
arrange to run their queues at different times.)
If you know what you are doing, you can make sure that the lock
files are actually bogus (no sendmail process associated with them
and remove them by hand, this eliminates the need for the reboot
Once the lockfiles are gone, if you don't want to wait for the next
automatic queue run, you can run /usr/lib/sendmail -q
(You may need to be root to do this.)
Jonathon
