>At 09:32 AM 4/8/97 +0100, Philip Hazel wrote:
>>On Mon, 7 Apr 1997, John C. Ring, Jr. wrote:
>>
>>> Occasionally, I'm seeing messages sit on the queue for very long periods of
>>> time.
>>>
>>> I find that whenever I use exiwhat, the messages are then delivered.
>>
>>Exiwhat sends a signal to each Exim process. Therefore, the stuck
>>processes must be in some state of waiting for something, and the signal
>>frees it up. Which operating system are you using?
>
>I have Exim running on a Solaris 2.4 SPARCstation.
>
I wonder if this is the same problem that I had running exim on Solaris...
When I originally installed exim on our Sun system (running sol. 2.5.1)
I had lots of problems with email being stuck on the queue and not being
delivered because of 'spool file locked'. What was happening was that exim
could not deliver mail to local spool files because they were locked for
some reason. I'd not had a problem before using sendmail.
With help from Phil Hazel, I was able to track it down to the use of mailtool
and what it was doing regarding locking the mail file. The users were
using 'mailtool' and 'dtmail' to read mail and the problem was only seen
with users using mailtool. We found out that mailtool has an option under
'Advanced' or 'Expert' (I forget which) called 'use network aware file
locking' that needs to be checked. With it unchecked, mailtool was maintaining
a file lock EVEN when the program was in icon form, which prevented exim from
delivering the mail. By checking this option mailtool relied on .lock files
instead. Dtmail had this set by default unlike mailtool. We came to the
conclusion that sendmail must have only be using .lock files.
Try looking to see how users are reading their email, whether they're using
mailtool.
Incidentally, if you're using dtmail and ^M suddenly start appearing at the
end of every line of the message - I know why that's happening too!
Hope this helps,
Glenn
_______________________________________________________________________
Dr. Glenn Carver, Phone: +44 (1223) 336524
Centre for Atmospheric Science, Fax: +44 (1223) 336473
Cambridge University, Chemistry Dept., Glenn.Carver@???
Lensfield Road, Cambridge, CB2 1EW, UK www.atm.ch.cam.ac.uk/~glenn/
"Someone told me that each equation I included in the book would halve
the sales." Prof. Stephen Hawking, 'A Brief History of Time', 1988.
_______________________________________________________________________
