Dear All,
Having thought I'd got exim working, I check eximon to find that I have a
problem with some messages not being delivered to local mailboxes. The delivery
appears to be failing because exim is unable to get the lock using fcntl()
This is causing problems for users so I need to get this sorted out quickly.
It all used to work when I was using sendmail before.
I have a Sun box running solaris 2.5.1 which acts as our 'mailhost'. /var/mail
is on this machine and NFS exported to the client workstations. No quotas
are set on this filesystem.
I run Solaris mailtool on 'mailhost' and display back to my workstation.
When mailtool is in its icon form, exim can deliver mail to my mailbox.
However, if I open mailtool, do a 'load inbox', and sit there with my
messages displayed, exim fails to append new messages with 'unable to get fcntl'
Ah ha! I hear you all say, that's because mailtool has locked the
file. Ah ha! I say, if that was true then why did this problem not arise
with my old sendmail setup? I could have my mailtool window open and sendmail
would append new messages. I then do a 'load inbox' again and there they are.
Only when I iconify mailtool does exim deliver into my mailbox.
However, for 2 users (and why it's these two I don't know), even with the
mailtool in icon form, exim still fails on the fcntl lock. In this case,
they are reading their mail on a client workstation. Only if they quit mailtool
or if I delete their /var/mail file does exim then write to their mailbox.
I have watched exim create the lock file ok (/var/mail/user.lock). The
/var/mail directory has the following permissions:
drwxrwxrwt 4 root mail 1024 Mar 11 14:15 .
so the sticky bit is set.
The /var/mail directory is mounted by clients as follows:
/var/mail -rw,actimeo=0 caesar:/var/mail
The actime0=0 was recommended on the solaris installation notes, but I've
forgotten what. Since I have this problem when reading mail on the mailhost
(caesar) we can forget about NFS for the moment.
I build exim using Sun's C compiler (v4.0). I find gcc too slow. The
compile produced some warnings (about prototypes if I remember) but otherwise
compiled ok.
If anyone has seen this before, I'd be glad for some help.
Glenn
p.s. thinking about it, the only difference the two users mentioned above
have is that they are running Suns Openwindows and mailtool whereas I run
CDE + OW mailtool?
