Summary: /var/mail and lock files

From: ascott@zetex.com
Date: Thu Jul 15 1999 - 04:02:44 CDT


Thanks for all the fast responses, and to anyone's who's hasnt arrived yet :)

It turned out to be a permissions problem, the system was exported as read only!, but the users were still able to admin there email accounts and this is what through me of course, but the mailer obviously didnt have permissions to create the lock file hence the error message.
Original Q at the end.

Thanks to

Mike, who's anser got me looking in the right direction with the correct vfstab options
    

Bill Hebert,

We had the same problem when we disabled rpc.ttdbserverd due to security
concerns. We only had it with dtmail which is the mailtool program that
comes with CDE. Pine, ELM, and Mail do their own locking depending on how
you configure them during the build.

Ignoring it didn't seem to cause any problems, but the potential is still
there. When Sun finally released the patched version of rpc.ttdbserverd we
installed it and turned it back on in inetd.conf and the locking warning
went away. I don't know if there is a work around for this or not.

Daniel Polombo, informed me of the .lock file in the users home area.

Thanks again.
  Alan.

>
> I am sure I have seen this problem before but I am unable to resolve it
>
> sparc 20 running solaris Seven patched
> mail from mailserver forwarded to the sparc 20
>
> Sun 450 running 2.6 patched, nfs mounts /var/mail from sparc 20.
>
> Remotely logon to 450 and run mailtool, get message from mailtool:
> Cannot Get Lock file for Folder /var/mail/user
>
> I then get the option to ignore locking but this may damage mail file.
> If I ignore locking then mail is accessable.
>
> The closest I got was SRDB 5726, which mentions /var/mail/user_name.lock and
> BUG ID 4041012 which is almost bang on but doesnt have a solution.
>
> Will summerize



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