[3818] in Athena Bugs
sendmail can fail to start
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Mark Rosenstein)
Wed Dec 13 12:25:48 1989
Date: Wed, 13 Dec 89 12:25:35 -0500
From: Mark Rosenstein <mar@MIT.EDU>
To: bugs@MIT.EDU
If sendmail is started with a controlling tty which is a network pty
that is not currently open (this sounds obscure, but it happens when
automatically restarting sendmail on the mailhub, or even the queue
scans from crontab if the cron daemon was restarted while someone was
netting into the machine), then sendmail may fail to start.
This is because it hangs attempting to open the controlling tty. The
fix is to change main.c, line 1052 from:
fd = open("/dev/tty", 2);
to
fd = open("/dev/tty", O_RDWR|O_NDELAY, 0);
Note that this fix cannot be sent back to Berkeley since it depends on
our kernels recognizing the "No delay" option while opening a
pseudo-tty which is not in the standard 4.3 kernel.
-Mark
