andy@syma.sussex.ac.uk (Andy Clews) (04/08/91)
At my site, we have a "support" mailbox which is owned by a dummy user and
which is group read/writeable by several named users on the system. This
allows any of those persons to read, act upon, and delete mail messages sent
to "support". With ordinary (UCB) mail, use of this mailbox works fine.
With UCB mail we have "set keep" in force so that the support mailbox never
gets deleted when it is empty, thus preserving permissions etc.
To read this mailbox with Elm, I give the "c" command and specify
/usr/spool/mail/support as the folder to change to. All works fine; i.e. I
can read, save, delete messages etc., but when the time comes to quit, Elm
gives the following two messages:
Problems restoring permissions of folder /usr/spool/mail/support!
Error EPERM trying to change file /usr/spool/mail/support access time.
The strange thing is, the mailbox IS successfully dealt with - i.e. deleted
messages disappear, and permissions stay intact. In other words, Elm
appears to be telling me about non-existant problems!
Can anyone out there tell me what's going on, and what can be done to stop
it?
In an attempt to fool Elm, I created a symlink in my own Mail directory,
called support, that was linked to /usr/spool/mail/support. I was then able
to change folder to just "support" (rather than give full pathname). I
found I was able to delete messages and so on, BUT, when I quit Elm (no
error messages this time) I noticed that (a) the original mailbox was not
updated, and (b) the file "support" in my Mail directory was now an
ordinary file - i.e. the link had been destroyed - and only it contained
the remaining messages.
Strange. Any ideas, anyone?
BTW I am new to this discussion group. My apologies if this problem has been
aired before.
Thank you.
--
Andy Clews, Computing Service, Univ. of Sussex, Brighton BN1 9QN, England
JANET: andy@uk.ac.sussex.syma BITNET: andy%syma.sussex.ac.uk@uk.acsyd@DSI.COM (Syd Weinstein) (04/12/91)
andy@syma.sussex.ac.uk (Andy Clews) writes: >At my site, we have a "support" mailbox which is owned by a dummy user and >which is group read/writeable by several named users on the system. This >allows any of those persons to read, act upon, and delete mail messages sent >to "support". With ordinary (UCB) mail, use of this mailbox works fine. >With UCB mail we have "set keep" in force so that the support mailbox never >gets deleted when it is empty, thus preserving permissions etc. >To read this mailbox with Elm, I give the "c" command and specify >/usr/spool/mail/support as the folder to change to. All works fine; i.e. I >can read, save, delete messages etc., but when the time comes to quit, Elm >gives the following two messages: > Problems restoring permissions of folder /usr/spool/mail/support! > Error EPERM trying to change file /usr/spool/mail/support access time. These have to do with the way Elm handles copy out and back. It actually deletes and recreates the spool mail box if it can, and then changes the permissions back (because it tries to do a mv of the tmp file over top of the regular file). In your case, the mv fails, and it copies it back (which takes longer) so you see it work, but it also reports the errors trying to restore the permissions (which already match because it did a copy instead of a move.) The symlink problem is the same, here it is able to do the unlink, as you own the symlink directory and then can do the move back. -- ===================================================================== Sydney S. Weinstein, CDP, CCP Elm Coordinator Datacomp Systems, Inc. Voice: (215) 947-9900 syd@DSI.COM or dsinc!syd FAX: (215) 938-0235