Re: IMAP (Netscape?) hiccups in Woody
On Fri, 14 Jul 2000, Pedro I. Sanchez wrote:
> Well, this is bizarre:
>
> # ls -l /var/spool/
> total 20
> ...
> lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 7 May 5 09:59 mail -> ../mail
> ...
>
> # ls -l /var/
> total 72
> ...
> drwxrwsr-x 2 root mail 4096 Jul 14 18:04 mail
> ...
>
> What created this symlink? I didn't.
>
Supposedly the new Linux File system standard (FHS) makes /var/mail the
official location for the mail spool. A symlink to /var/spool/mail will
be kept for backwards compatability. Debian is going to move to this but
I don't think it's official policy yet. It looks like the maintainer of
your MTA jumped the gun.
Oddly enough on one of my potato systems using sendmail, the situation is
backward. /var/spool/mail is a directory and /var/mail is a symlink to
it. On a woody system running postfix the situation is the same.
> I have quite a lot of messages like this in the mail log:
>
> Jul 10 09:30:39 psanchez-1 imapd[16264]: Killed (lost mailbox lock)
> user=psanchez host=psanchez-1 [127.0.0.1]
>
> I will get rid of the symlink and test to see if that makes the
> difference. I'll let you know.
>
Yup I suspect it was not creating the lock at all. Without a lock you
stand a chance of having your mail spool corrupted.
If this turns out to be the problem, file a bug against your MTA if one
hasn't been filed already.
--
Jaldhar H. Vyas <jaldhar@debian.org>
Reply to: