I have been running the qualcomm pop server for some time and it has mostly
worked. However under heavy loads it has caused us some problems. since we
have put ethernet in all the dorms we are getting alot more POP usage then
in the past... I also have tried various of the compile time options, like
SERVER_MODE and NO_STATUS. These have revealed some interesting locking
problems.
In some cases I was seeing lots of .__afsXXX files. Actually after one
weekend there were so many that we discovered a salvager bug. The salvage
would only pick up .__afsXXXX files and not the .__afsXXX or .__afsXX ones
(Can you say a big mess?). Looking through the code, it becomes clear that
the locking is inconsistant, and file discriptors are left open after lock
files are removed. The order of "maillock", flock, .user.pop file accesses
are not always the same or complete. There should really be locking and
unlocking routines that all or most of the code uses.
Anyhow I got tired of babysitting the popper and replaced it with the ipop3d
from the imap-4.1.BETA c-client code from Marc Crispan. It comes with AFS or
kerberos support. I have had absolutly *no* problems with it in three
months, including the past over loading problems. There is one "gotcha"
though. The ipop3d, like imapd, keep a message in the top of the berkeley
mail spool labled "DO NOT DELETE THIS MESSAGE". Those users that use Pine
(also c-client based) and POP often question what that message is doing in
their mail spool and can they delete it. The IMAP users see this too, but do
not complain since they are more sophisticated. A small price to pay for
high reliability, and Pine-4.0 will probably ignore this message anyhow
(Pine is by far our most popular mail client). It is also nice to use the
same code (c-client) for imap and pop services.
Randall
On Mon, 26 Jan 1998, Chad Dougherty wrote:
: Is anyone here running the qualcomm pop server using AFS kaservers? It
: didn't build with the AFS kerberos libraries, so I tried linking with
: the MIT krb4 libs for kicks. It didn't work, and I'm having a hard time
: figuring out what patches I need to apply to the qpopper src. Thanks in
: advance....
:
: -Chad
:
