[Another?] Big, nasty bug in A/UX rmail and/or uuxqt

[Alexis Rosen]

henry at chinet.chi.il.us (Henry C. Schmitt) writes:
>alexis at panix.uucp (Alexis Rosen) writes:
>>It seems I was right in my guess that they were running out of file
>>descriptors. Changing the appropriate kernel parameters fixed things.

No, I wasn't. See my previous message about this, it's a real bug.

>I'm getting a different problem with uucp.  Simply put, rmail to a
>valid user fails.  The relevant section of the LGOFILE is:
>[ not important... ]
>
>and the returned message is:
>
>[...]
>From: yoruba!uucp (UUCP admin)     [ this is Henry's A/UX host ]
>Message-Id: <9012111557.AA00325 at yoruba>
>To: chinet!uucp
>
>Mail failed (PATH=/bin:/usr/bin LOGNAME=uucp TZ=`/bin/cat rmail
>henry ).  Letter
> returned to sender.

Aha.
This is a known bug. Known (and hated) by me for 18 months, acknowledged
by Apple two weeks ago. (Thanks Vicki...)

Fortunately it's very simple to deal with. Put the following two lines in
your uudemon.hr file (or whatever shell script you use to call out) before
you invoke uucico:
TZ=`cat /etc/TIMEZONE`
export TZ

>The main problem with this is that it is not consistant.  Most times
>mail works fine, but once in a while it barfs!

Chances are it's working when you are being called (ie, uucico starts up with
uushell, which sets TZ correctly). When you call out, you're using uudemon.hr,
which is broken, and so mail fails.

BTW, when you invoke uucico (or uudemon.hr) by hand in an environment that
has TZ set, naturally it will work. This is tricky, as this may be the case
when you're debugging, so you'll never see the problem during tests...

(God, it's scary to think that I'm becoming something of an A/UX uucp guru.
I can't think of a more useless thing... :-) )

---
Alexis Rosen
Owner/Sysadmin, PANIX Public Access Unix, NY
{cmcl2,apple}!panix!alexis