Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!bloom-beacon!think!ames!pasteur!ucbvax!PEANUTS.NOSC.MIL!dennis From: dennis@PEANUTS.NOSC.MIL (Dennis Cottel) Newsgroups: comp.sys.apollo Subject: sendmail problem Message-ID: <8808162127.AA08397@cod.nosc.mil> Date: 16 Aug 88 21:21:15 GMT Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU Organization: The Internet Lines: 39 I'm looking for experience with sendmail running on the Apollos. I have talked to Apollo. After checking for the correct links, permission, etc, they say they have never seen this behavior. How about any of you? We are running SR9.7, TCP3.1beta. Sendmail is running on a DSP80A gateway connected to several VAXes running 4.3 BSD. The network and the TCP servers seem to be rock solid at this point. Sendmail is configured to put all mail into the queue, with a separate daemon process running the queue every 5 minutes. This was to get around an apparent bug where incoming (to the Apollo) mail would sometimes get silently dropped. Users use /usr/ucb/Mail. Every so often, maybe a couple times a week, sendmail will not be able to deliver a message. If it is able to return an error message, it will say "554 \dennis... unknown mailer error 1" with the accompanying message mail: cannot append to /usr/spool/mail/dennis mail: can't send to dennis or maybe just "554 \dennis... unknown mailer error 2". On some of these occasions, the error seemed to occur at about the time a user was getting out of mail, or using the command "file %" to update the mail file. At other times, this wasn't the case. The only other unusual thing I can think of is that users have a .forward file in their home directory that both delivers the mail, and pipes it through a program which uses send_alarm to put up a notice containing the message's Subject: and From: lines. My .forward file looks like: \dennis "|/user/local/com/mail_alarm dennis" but note that the errors are (seem to be) associated with the \dennis part and not the mail_alarm part. So how come I'm the only one in the world with this problem?! Dennis Cottel Naval Ocean Systems Center, San Diego, CA 92152 (619) 553-1645 dennis@NOSC.MIL sdcsvax!noscvax!dennis