On Thu, 29 Mar 2018, Kerim Aydin wrote:
On Thu, 29 Mar 2018, Ã?rjan Johansen wrote:
Ã?rjan.
You're doing this just to vex me right?
*MWAHAHAHA*
No, actually it was the result of a desperate attempt not to change (much)
how I read email. I'm a duct tape kind of person...
Ever since I got this account with the NVG computer club back in
199something, I've been reading mail with (al)pine on one of NVG's server,
with the default inbox, which has for decades been NFS-mounted from the
mail server (which is not really encouraged for ordinary logins.)
However, last autumn (iirc) they upgraded Fedora on the login server I
generally use, which I believe introduced a different NFS client behavior,
and after that alpine panics with a locking error when new email arrives.
The NVG admin I talked to couldn't quite make heads or tails of how to fix
the NFS, but suggested I use one of NVGs Debian servers instead, which
didn't seem to have the bug.
Because *those* servers had previously given me problems with IRC+tmux,
which is the *other* main thing I use the login server for, I didn't
actually change my main login server (I still haven't), but instead
changed my tmux pine window to ssh to another server and start alpine
there.
That worked for months. But just a week or so ago, they upgraded the
Debian servers so they too got the bug.
So as a new desperate idea, I tried to just change the ssh to go to the
mail server, where the inbox is obviously _not_ NFS mounted.
Unfortunately, as I said it's not really meant for general login, so while
it *seemed* to work for a few minutes, it soon turned out to have strange
issues with pine's character and terminal handling, which is what you saw.
I discovered that the mail server has a bitrotted version of pine (not
even alpine, although I didn't notice that at first because pine is just
another name for alpine on the other servers).
So now I finally set alpine up to use IMAP for the inbox instead.
Greetings,
Ørjan.
