[36788] in Hotline Meeting
Re: mail still gets hoarded by computers
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jonathon Weiss)
Fri Feb 7 02:56:53 1997
Date: Fri, 7 Feb 1997 02:56:50 -0500 (EST)
To: Eva Moy <emoy@MIT.EDU>, Eva Moy <emoy@MIT.EDU>
Cc: bugs@MIT.EDU, gsc-official@MIT.EDU, emoy@MIT.EDU, hotline@MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: "[14936] in Athena Bugs"
From: Jonathon Weiss <jweiss@MIT.EDU>
Hello,
Sorry it tookme so long to get back to you, we're all a little busy
here.
in oct/nov, i had lots of problems sending out mail from sgi's. i
don't know off hand whether m37-312-14 is an sgi, but the mail was
actually delivered more than 1.5 months after i sent it.
Actually, that machine is a sun, not an sgi. As it turns out there is
a different (and harder to fix) bug on the suns that also causes mail
to get stuck. We have a work around that we plan to install sometime
during the term, that should prevent mail from getting stuck for more
than about 24 hours (I know it isn't great, but it's better than
nothing), and we're hoping to have the bug completely fixed in the
Athena 8.1 release which is due out this summer.
i know it's annoying and you guys have a patch (supposedly) but do you
understand that i have looked like a complete idiot for three months
because stuff gets sent and makes no sense because it's way out of date?
That patch was, in fact, released during IAP. Until the workaround
goes out I can offer a suggestion as to how to reduce the chances of
your mail getting delayed for this long. Before you log out of a
machine you can run the command 'mailq' and see if any of the mail
messages you sent are listed (it is normail for messages to be listed
for up to a minute after you send them, but after that may indicate a
problem.) If any of your messages are listed, the easiest thing to do
is to log out and log back in as root (you can find the passwd with
the command "tellme root") and type reboot. This will reboot the
machine and it should send your message the first time it tries to
clear its mail queue (which should occur within two hours). I
understand that none of this is as helpful as you'd like, and I
appologize for that.
Jonathon Weiss
jweiss@mit.edu
MIT IS/Athena Programmer
