hung line help needed -- sendmail, not uucico

[Bruce Nemnich]

Well, it turns out this problem is not uucico's at all.  It turns out
that sendmail execs its mailers with SIGALRM blocked.  

4.2bsd sendmail comes configured for uucp mail with the "-r" uux option,
which prevents uucico from starting up immediately, in which case
SIGALRM doesn't matter.  However, I took out the -r in order to place
demand calls as soon as mail was processed; the resulting uucico then
inherits the blocked SIGALRM, so if anythnig happens to the connection
which would normally cause a timeout (typically trying to login), the
process will hang forever.

I haven't looked at sendmail for the cause yet, but a temporary
circumvention for uucico is to add a sigsetmask(0) at the top of main()
in cico.c.
-- 
--Bruce Nemnich, Thinking Machines Corporation, Cambridge, MA
  ihnp4!godot!bruce, bjn at mit-mc.arpa ... soon to be bruce at godot.arpa