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Subject: -57- Why am I having problems with my NFS-mounted mail spool?
Date: 02 Mar 1996 00:00:01 EST
Perhaps for one of the following reasons:
- IRIX 5.2 NFS has a bug which prevents writing to a zero-length file
if the writing process has group write permission but not group read
(or user write) permission. IRIX 5.2 /bin/mail likes to set the
permissions of /var/mail/<user> to mode 620, exactly what is needed
to exercise the NFS bug. There is no patch for these bugs, but both
are fixed in IRIX 5.3. Meanwhile, you can work around the problem by
chmod'ing your mail files to 660 and setting the appropriate option
in your mail program to make sure that empty mail files are not
removed.
- lockd must be running on the NFS server to allow programs on the
client to lock mail files. If it is not, Zmail/MediaMail will
complain that "file cannot be locked". One could tell MediaMail to
not request a lock with "unset dot_lock", but that would risk mail
file corruption.
- IRIX 5.3 lockd is broken. Typical symptoms include "Warning: could
not lock /var/mail/user after 100 trys." (from /usr/sbin/Mail) and
the presence of user.lock and user.rolock files in /var/mail. Patch
1128 fixes at least some of these problems. If the client and
server are both IRIX 5.3, you can also work around the problem by
changing the mount type to NFS3. (See notes on NFS3 elsewhere in
this FAQ.)
See also "NFS Mounting Mail with IRIX 5.3 and IRIX 6.0.1" in the
Sep/Oct 1995 Pipeline.
Up: SGI admin Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
Next: -58- Why are incoming mail addresses case-sensitive in IRIX 5.3?
Previous: -56- What's "mailbox: Error 0"?