Summary: CDE Dtmail & mailbox access problems

From: Marlon Cole (cczcole@unix.ccc.nottingham.ac.uk)
Date: Wed Jul 24 1996 - 04:03:01 CDT


My problem, in a nutshell, was that dtmail would complain about not being
able to open a mail folder in an NFS-mounted /var/mail & wouldn't work
properly.

Many thanks to all those who took the trouble to reply, although it turns
out we were all duped as to where the problem lie - we'd all suspected
either problems with different versions of NFS (the NFS server isn't a
Sun, but a Digital Unix v3.2c setup) and/or lockd.
Using "truss" and "snoop" I was able to observe that no 'traditional'
file locking was taking place, but instead that a connection was being
made back to the NFS server to port 100083 - tooltalk.
I ran up rpc.ttdbserverd on the NFS server, and then dtmail on the Sun
clients appears to burst into life. Who'd have thought it?
I presume this is the way CDE &/or dtmail performs its own version
of file locking in this case, but I have no answer for why it can't just
use 'traditional' methods in the first place.
Anyway, it's a real 'gotcha' & not one that I'm too impressed about.

Having done this I'm not sure I want to stop using exmh & use dtmail
instead anyway ;-)

Regards,
           Marlon

--
Marlon Cole             email: Marlon.Cole@nottingham.ac.uk
Systems Section         Tel:   0115 951 3398
Cripps Computing Centre URL: http://www.ccc.nottingham.ac.uk/~cczcole/Home.html
University of Nottingham, ENGLAND.



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