[net.bugs.4bsd] hung line help needed -- sendmail, not uucico

bruce@godot.UUCP (Bruce Nemnich) (12/08/84)

Well, it turns out this problem is not uucico's at all.  It turns out
that sendmail execs its mailers with SIGALRM blocked.  

4.2bsd sendmail comes configured for uucp mail with the "-r" uux option,
which prevents uucico from starting up immediately, in which case
SIGALRM doesn't matter.  However, I took out the -r in order to place
demand calls as soon as mail was processed; the resulting uucico then
inherits the blocked SIGALRM, so if anythnig happens to the connection
which would normally cause a timeout (typically trying to login), the
process will hang forever.

I haven't looked at sendmail for the cause yet, but a temporary
circumvention for uucico is to add a sigsetmask(0) at the top of main()
in cico.c.
-- 
--Bruce Nemnich, Thinking Machines Corporation, Cambridge, MA
  ihnp4!godot!bruce, bjn@mit-mc.arpa ... soon to be bruce@godot.arpa

wls@astrovax.UUCP (William L. Sebok) (12/08/84)

> Well, it turns out this problem is not uucico's at all.  It turns out
> that sendmail execs its mailers with SIGALRM blocked.  
> 
> 4.2bsd sendmail comes configured for uucp mail with the "-r" uux option,
> which prevents uucico from starting up immediately, in which case
> SIGALRM doesn't matter.  However, I took out the -r in order to place
> demand calls as soon as mail was processed; the resulting uucico then
> inherits the blocked SIGALRM, so if anythnig happens to the connection
> which would normally cause a timeout (typically trying to login), the
> process will hang forever.
> 
> I haven't looked at sendmail for the cause yet, but a temporary
> circumvention for uucico is to add a sigsetmask(0) at the top of main()
> in cico.c.
> -- 
> --Bruce Nemnich, Thinking Machines Corporation, Cambridge, MA
>   ihnp4!godot!bruce, bjn@mit-mc.arpa ... soon to be bruce@godot.arpa

This is very likely the problem here.  I'll try out the suggested fix.
I had also taken out the -r flag in the uux command.
-- 
Bill Sebok			Princeton University, Astrophysics
{allegra,akgua,burl,cbosgd,decvax,ihnp4,noao,princeton,vax135}!astrovax!wls