On Sat, Jul 24, 2010 at 12:28:01PM +0100, Chris G wrote: > I'm seeing the "Stale NFS file handle" messages on the mutt status > line, I'm not *absolutely* sure when they are occurring but it looks > as if it's when a mail is delivered into a mailbox when I'm viewing an > E-Mail in that mailbox with mutt.
Stale NFS filehandles are not, strictly speaking, locking problems. They're caused by when a file or directory is deleted or renamed on the server, but the client still has an open filehandle to the file, IIRC. > E.g. I was working down my inbox (where non-list mail arrives) this > morning and, after reading a message, when I returned to the inbox > (quite likely after marking the mail as deleted) I saw the stale NFS > error. I *think* the message I had just viewed had failed to get > marked as D or O, it remained at N and there was one new message in > the inbox. This doesn't sound like it should cause a stale filehandle, but you mentioned some delivery program written in Python. I can't guess what it's doing, and it may have some incorrect or conflicting implementation of locking or delivery that's causing the problem. I can't guess why you're not using procmail or some other well-tested delivery agent, or why you're reading mbox mail over NFS, but in general both of those choices seem rather bad. I'm not trying to suggest you use maildir (though clearly that might be a solution to your problem), but NFS + mbox = bad. Better would be to read the mail locally on the server, or get it somehow delivered to the machine on which you care to read it. Or IMAP. In my personal order of preference. :) -- Derek D. Martin http://www.pizzashack.org/ GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02 -=-=-=-=- This message is posted from an invalid address. Replying to it will result in undeliverable mail due to spam prevention. Sorry for the inconvenience.
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