Subject: Truncated files NOT due to procmail

From: "D.Ashton-Reader" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 21 Apr 1995 16:36:25 +0000

(Well it *is* a procmail topic, because procmail tends to get blamed)

Sometimes my users report 'truncated' messages, where they see the
start of a message, but the latter part has been overwritten by a
subsequent message (which appear as part of the first since there
is no blank line - 'From ' line sequence - it has been overwritten)

What happened today is that a user reported a truncated message
*with nothing following*, and what I found is that the mailbox
only appeared truncated when viewed from that machine, i.e. whatever
I used to view his mailbox on his own machine (tail, view, Mail etc)
showed the mailbox as truncated, but any other machine showed it OK!

Of course when he writes stuff back to update his mailbox (Mail 'q' etc)
then the mailbox gets the truncated version and the file really is duff.

So this is a lower level problem and not a procmail one, and we are
talking to SG (SG client viewing mailbox on SG NFS mailhub) about it

But if anyone has any idea what is going on please pass your ideas on :)

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From: [email-masked] (Stephen R. van den Berg)
Date: Fri, 21 Apr 1995 19:07:14 +0200

>talking to SG (SG client viewing mailbox on SG NFS mailhub) about it

There are three known (to me) cases where this happens:
1. [email-masked] (Eric Hammond) reported this problem about
   eight months ago.  Back then, his site recently upgraded the Silicon
   Graphics machines to Irix 5.0, I believe.  It turned out to be a NFS
   problem.  As far as I recall, they solved the problem in close contact
   with Silicon Graphics.  Apparently they debugged it on site and provided
   the necessary kernel patches.
2. Someone else with Irix 5.0 reported the same problem four months ago.
   I referred him to Eric, haven't heard from him since (actually, forgot
   who it was :-).
3. I see it happen between a HP/UX 9.01 NFS client and a Solaris 2.3
   NFS server (on a regular basis, but not with procmail, with ld).

-- 
Sincerely,                                  [email-masked]
           Stephen R. van den Berg (AKA BuGless).

Climate is what you expect.  Weather is what you get.

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From: Penio Penev <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 21 Apr 1995 14:30:55 -0400 (EDT)

>    I referred him to Eric, haven't heard from him since (actually, forgot

Irix has other nasty NFS bugs, especially when interoperating NFS 2(?) (Irix
4) and NFS 3(?) (Irix 5). There is a partch for Irix 5.3 -- patchSG0000401 on
ftp://sgi.sgi.com/private/patch_401.tar , that solves this, among other
problems. I'm announcing this here, because we lost half a day to diagnose
it, before calling SGI to hear "But yes! Get patch 401." 

I'm heavily looking into local delivery, coupled with IMAP mail reading to
solve future problems of the kind. 

--
Penio Penev <[email-masked]> 1-212-327-7423