[14833] in Athena Bugs
Re: UNDELIVERED_MAIL
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Matt Braun)
Wed Nov 20 00:05:00 1996
From: Matt Braun <matt@MIT.EDU>
To: Mike Jacknis <mjacknis@MIT.EDU>
Cc: Matt Braun <mhbraun@MIT.EDU>, bugs@MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Tue, 19 Nov 1996 23:52:25 EST."
<9611200452.AA19870@dizzy.MIT.EDU>
Date: Wed, 20 Nov 1996 00:04:56 EST
It is definitely a bug, probably with the version of sendmail that is shipped
with suns (do you see this on SGI's too?). When sendmail processes a message
it creates a lock file so another sendmail process that comes along does not
touch it. What is likely happening is that the sendmail that is workong on
the messages in question is dying for some unforseen reason, and leaving the
message locked. What should happen is that when the sendmail processing that
message exits, it should delete the lock file, so that the cron job that runs
approxmately hourly that flushes the mail queue can deliver the message.
The residual lock files are removed at boot time when the workstation can be
sure that there really are no sendmail processes working on the locked
messages, so this would be less of a problem if the sun sendmail did not have
this elusive bug, or we had more power failures :-)
This related to why people sometimes get month old mail delivered after an
Athena release. Part of the update process is to reboot the machine, and when
that happens and locked messages can get flushed.
Matt
