It'd be nice if this worked its way into the standard distribution. I'd love to have something like that.
Btw: your story is exactly why I avoid local code customizations. Unless the project developer is willing to take my proposed changes into the main code base, I don't bother. Local source code changes == long term software maintenance nightmares.
It's not that I can't ... I've done my fair share of C coding ... it's just not worth my time. If it can't be done via the configure script and build options, or via command line args (sometimes config files, given earlier statements) or wrapper scripts, it's just not worth it. I have 10+ year old Athena stuff I have to support because it was so heavily locally customized that we can't just upgrade it to newer versions of Athena ... and it's not worth our time to track down everything. So we're basically trying to build around it, and phase out each piece as we're able to replace it with something newer and easier to maintain.
You'd be suprised how many sysadmin interview candidates completely overlook that part of our standard interview question about working with source-included software.
On Thursday, Oct 31, 2002, at 08:14 US/Pacific, Jeff A. Earickson wrote:
Simon,
For what it is worth, attached is my patchfile for my own 3.x era
work on qpopper. I had a ton of local customizations in version 3 of
qpopper, most of which I dropped when I went to version 4 (I embraced
the server mode option -S). One of the hacks I had in version three
was the "accesstime" option, setable via command line as "-a". Search
the patchfile for the word "accesstime". This feature required you to
use KEEP_TEMP_DROP. What the pop_accesstime() subroutine did was to
compare the timestamp of the dropfile to the current time. If the
difference was less than accesstime, then the user got the POP error
message "you just checked your mail!" and rejected the connection without
touching the mailbox. This bit of code punished impatient users who
wanted to check their email every few seconds.
This routine would require some work to fit into version 4, because
the "p" structure changed considerably between v3 and v4. If you are
a C programmer and have a little time, you should be able to add
this feature to v4. Good luck.
-----------------------------------
Jeff A. Earickson, Ph.D
Senior UNIX Sysadmin and Email Guru
Information Technology Services
Colby College, 4214 Mayflower Hill,
Waterville ME, 04901-8842
phone: 207-872-3659 (fax = 3076)
-----------------------------------
On Thu, 31 Oct 2002, Simon May wrote:
Date: Thu, 31 Oct 2002 16:45:23 +0100
From: Simon May <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: Subscribers of Qpopper <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Users popping to often
I must say I was hoping that there was a way to stop the users popping to
much
I find when I ask users to reduce the frequency they comply with no
problems.
I was thinking that maybe there is a way to leave the lock files in place
for a set time
after the session finishes though I didn't notice the command in the docs
and playing
with the timeouts does not seem to do this.
Simon
----- Original Message -----
From: "Deid Reimer" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
I wrote a Perl script to analyse the logs and calculate traffic both
moved on the network and moved on our mail server.
Seems to work - none of our customers are currently abusing the system.
Simon May wrote:Dear All I have a number of users you are checking for mail very frequently,every30s etc.<diffs.312.to.322>
