[36089] in Hotline Meeting
Re: Athena terminal not sending email dependably
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jonathon Weiss)
Fri Dec 6 19:24:07 1996
From: Jonathon Weiss <jweiss@MIT.EDU>
To: jceggles@MIT.EDU, jjmorey@MIT.EDU
Cc: ops@MIT.EDU, postmasters@MIT.EDU, hotline@MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Fri, 06 Dec 1996 09:03:16 EST."
<9612061403.AA19482@hector.MIT.EDU>
Date: Fri, 06 Dec 1996 19:24:03 EST
> Hello, the Interlibrary borrowing office in the Humanities library has
> an Athena terminal, hum-ilb, which is used for, among other things,
> notifying patrons that their materials have arrived. Many of these
> messages are not being received by the addressees, so they don't know
> their material is in, and they don't pick it up. It's pretty serious.
> Can you look into this?
>
> Please let me know if I should check anything here or if you need more
> information.
There is currently a problem with sun workstations. Under certain
conditions a piece of mail that is being sent will get stuck on the
local workstation. I do not believe that this ever causes a permenant
loss of the mail, although the mail will stay on the workstation until
it is next rebooted, which can be a long time. Specifically the
problem appears to be that sendmail (the program that actually sends
the maill off of the workstation) sometimes dies in the middle of
processing a message. Unfortunately, sendmail leaves around a lock
file when this happens. If there was no lock file the message would
be delivered then next time something tryied to clean up the mail
queue on the workstation (athena workstations are configured to do
this once an hour.) The reason that rebooting solves this problem is
that all of the sendmail lock files are removed at boot time (since
any sendmails that were running died when the system was shut down.)
There are a couple of things you can do about this. First you can
check to see if there are any messages in the mail queue by rinning
the command 'mailq' at the athena% prompt. Second you can reboot the
machine, either by hand when you notice stuck mail messages, or
automatically at periodic intervals. You want to use either the
shutdown or reboot command as root to do this, because they are much
better for the machine than other methods.) Third, you could replace
the version of sendmail you are running on that machine.
Unfortunately, there isn't a good version that I can suggest you grab
available on athena right now, although there may be some time in the
near future. If you are interested in this option, let me know, but
be forewarned that it will require making several changes that may not
be preserved accross athena updates.
Jonathon Weiss
jweiss@mit.edu
Athena Server Operations
