At 17:38 19/09/02 -0400, Alan Brown wrote: >On Fri, 20 Sep 2002, Simon Byrnand wrote: > >> The only way a stale .pop file would be left behind indefinately is if the >> popper process itself crashed, or was forcibly (-9) killed, or the >> operating system crashed. > >Or Qpopper flags are set to leave them behind. They're another way of >seeing whan a user last popped.
Would that prevent new sessions from logging on later though ? And if so, what would be the point ? It sounds like in his case the stale .pop files are preventing him from logging in again, so I doubt thats the case here. It needs to be established whether they're really stale, or whether the popper process is just taking a long time to exit after a session is lost. I found that it could take anywhere from 5 to 15 minutes for a session to time out if the user "dissapeared" completely (eg modem hangup) In my case (Linux 2.2.21) I found the following settings eased the problem a great deal: echo 3 >/proc/sys/net/ipv4/tcp_retries1 echo 5 >/proc/sys/net/ipv4/tcp_retries2 The default settings were 7 and 15 respectively. Now a disapearing client causes qpopper to timeout usally between about 2 and 3 minutes. (And doesn't seem to negatively impact other programs.... since it is a global tcp setting...) Regards, Simon
