Subject: Re: hanging procmail process continue

From: Samuel Tardieu <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 4 May 1995 10:02:41 +0200

>>>>> "Paul" == Paul Lew <[email-masked]> writes:

Paul> I just switched my home directory from an OSF machine to an
Paul> Ultrix machine two days ago (because of disk space problem).
Paul> Could this problem caused by the old NFS on the Ultrix?

Yes, this is likely to be the cause of your nightmares.

What you have to do is:

  1) Recompile procmail -- during the configuration phase, procmail
     will ask you to pick up several directories to try. Don't forget
     to give it one of each type : OSF, Ultrix, local, ...

  2) Get a newer version. The latest official release is 3.10.

If this doesn't solve your problem, go through procmail's
documentation and look for the section showing how to disable any lock
method but dot locking.

 Sam
--
"La cervelle des petits enfants, ca doit avoir comme un petit gout de noisette"
                                                       Charles Baudelaire

---

From: Paul Lew <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 3 May 1995 16:03:22 -0400

I did some more investigation on the problem and found out the following
messages shown up in my 'from' file.

procmail: Forcing lock on "/nfs/paw/users/lew/.lockmail"

According to the man page:

  Forcing lock on "x"    Lockfile "x" is going to be removed by force because
                         of a timeout (see also: LOCKTIMEOUT).

Because of a timeout on what?  Is this mean that the .lockmail was
created but was later removed because the 'process' was not able to
finish?

Since the procmail is not doing anything, I decided to kill it with
-INT, this cause the following message written to the 'from' file:

procmail: Terminating prematurely whilst waiting for a kernel-lock

The man page also say:

  Kernel-lock failed     While trying to  use  the  kernel-supported  locking
                         calls,  one  of them failed (usually indicates an OS
                         error), procmail ignores this error and proceeds.

I just switched my home directory from an OSF machine to an Ultrix
machine two days ago (because of disk space problem).  Could this
problem caused by the old NFS on the Ultrix?