mailbox

[Eva Manolis]

In article <9009222055.AA00571 at paling.cwi.nl>, robertl at cwi.nl writes:
|> 
|> 	> mailbox: Bad file number
|> 	> mailbox: Bad file number
|> 	> mailbox: Bad file number
|> 	> mailbox: Bad file number
|> 
|> 	> any ideas what's happening ??
|> 
|> We had that too. In our case 'fam' couldn't be launched by
|> 'inetd' properly. Try executing '/usr/etc/fam' manually. It
|> will probably print some additional info as to what is going on
|> (in our case 'fam' couldn't open /dev/imon). You will probably be
|> ok if you can get 'fam' to work.
|> 
|> By the way : if you are using central mail services you should
|> consider doing something like :
|> 	
|> 	$ ln -s $HOME/.mail /usr/spool/mail/$LOGNAME
|> 	$ mailbox -f $HOME/.mail
|> 
|> This is because every second or so 'fam' will do an 'ls -l' 
|> of the directory in which your mail-file is in. 
|> In our case we had +/- 15 users doing an ls -l in /usr/spool/mail
|> 

I little info on 'fam' here....

fam will NEVER do an 'ls -l' of a directory. 
IF ( and only if) the directory is NFS mounted ( which seems to be 
the case for Robert van Liere ) 'fam' will 'stat' the directory to
track changes. If the files reside on a local file system, there is
no polling ( no 'stats' ). fam works with events generated when the filesystem
is changed, so it's as cheap and low overhead as it can be.
For NFS directories and files, the stat's are every 3 seconds.

As far as having trouble starting fam, since fam uses inetd if the
machine is having network problems, fam will have trouble starting.
Also, inetd uses YP, so if you have YP configured on, you need to make
sure that the YP server knows about the 'fam' service.
   ( a message will appear in /usr/adm/SYSLOG, to clue you in on fam problems)

To make sure YP is set up correctly, find out who your YP server is
   % ypwhich
    <some machine name here>

then, login onto your yp server, and make sure that the /etc/rpc file contains
a line in it that says  
    sgi_fam	391002

If it doesn't, add it.
Then ( as root )
	% cd /usr/etc/rpc; make

Everything should be ok now.

Have fun
-eva