On Wed, 17 Jan 2001, Jim Pazarena wrote:
> I have 5 machines all running on FreeBSD 4.1, with exim v3.20 and
> using BerkeleyDB 3.1.14.
>
> They all have lockfiles (wait-remote_smtp.lockfile, retry.lockfile &
> reject.lockfile) hanging around indefineately.
>
> I have not set "lockfile_timeout", because the default (30m) should be
> adequate.
>
> The lockfiles however are days -- even weeks old.
This is not a problem. The lockfiles for the hints databases do not lock
by their mere existence. They are opened, and a lock is taken out on the
open file when Exim wants to lock a hints database. Once created, the
lock files never go away. I thought I said this in the manual, but I
can't find it. Maybe I said it in the book...
[Originally, Exim took out locks on the open database files, but because
the DBM libraries do things other than just opening files on their
"open" calls, this was buggy. For this reason, Exim needs a lock
*before* trying to open a hints database.]
lockfile_timeout is an option on the appendfile transport that applies
to the locking of mailbox files. In this case, the mere existence of the
lock file constitutes a lock.
--
Philip Hazel University of Cambridge Computing Service,
ph10@??? Cambridge, England. Phone: +44 1223 334714.
