On Wed, 2009-11-25 at 12:37 -0500, Robert Citek wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 25, 2009 at 12:27 PM, Theresa Kehoe <[email protected]> wrote:
> > But, does anyone have any good suggestions for how to troubleshoot this?
> > I did try "mark for reinstallation" of everything Evolution-related in
> > Synaptec, but that didn't appear to change anything.
> 
> Since we don't know exactly where the issue is, it could be anything
> from something relatively benign to just shy of catastrophic.  So to
> start:
> 
> 1) backup his data (image the whole disk if you can)

Working on it.  To start with, completely backed up the .evolution
folder.

> 2) boot a livecd and check the filesystem(s)

See #1

> 3) check filesystems for inode usage, df -i

See #1

> 4) for Firefox, check the user settings (Edit > Preferences > Privacy)

Checked all those when he told me about the problem.  Created a new
profile.  None of those things worked.

> 5) for Evolution, not sure as I don't use it.  My inclination would be
> to switch to IMAP over POP as POP has all some unresolved issues[1].

Why would POP work with Evolution just fine up through November 24, but
break on November 25?

Point is, when you click "Send/Receive", Evolution will send, but will
not even *attempt* to receive (according to Wireshark logs).  Created
new account in Evolution, no diff. in behavior.

> There's a bunch of other things to try, but we gotta start somewhere.

Also, a year or two back, he ran into a glitch with Evolution whereby,
when you had something like 2GB in your inbox, it broke.  I remember
stumbling through that one, and managed to find a workaround (although
he lost some of his accumulated junk) ... so I can't help wondering if
he hasn't hit some other undocumented limitation?

Again, point is, worked just fine at 2200 on 24 Nov 2009 ... broken at
0830 on 25 Nov 2009.  

For another fun experiment, I just now logged on to his machine, then
set up Evolution with his username and password ... and it works just
fine.  That points to it NOT being a physical hard drive issue, but
instead being some weird tipping point like the one I ran into in the
past.  

Evidently, Evolution has some limitations as to how much you can keep in
which directories, and he max'ed that out.  At least that's my best
guess.  No clue on Firefox (but didn't have time to test that out yet).

> Good luck and let us know how things go.

Always fun for the holidays!

My notion for a fix is to go shopping online for a new computer and
surprise him with an early Xmas gift!

:-)

(although unless I can do better teaching him to a) back up his data and
b) not keep 2GB of *crap* in his inbox, not sure if it will help all
that much)

Theresa

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