mail and 'quit' problem

[Chin Fang]

In article <RCAU8QVN at linac.fnal.gov>, looi at sutro.SFSU.EDU writes:
|> 
|> Hi, I'm running into problem with mail's "quit" subcommand and
|> hoping some experienced netters to give me some input as to what
|> I have done wrong.
|> 
|> We have three hosts running NFS, NIS and nameserver, and let's assume
|> host A being the master server. I exported /usr/spool/mail from
|> host A and had hosts B and C mounted over using NFS. With this setup,
|> I was hoping that users could read mail irregardless of where the users
|> are logged on, but the mail sessions froze on hosts B and C soon as
|> the users type "quit" (& quit) at the mail prompt. Does anyone know
|> what might have caused the problem?
|> 
|> Btw, we're running AIX 3005, and the mailer agent is sendmail.
|> 
|> Please help.
|> 
Well, for quite a while, I thought I was the only one suffering from this.
I think my 320 still runs 3003 as my head SA didn't mention any OS upgrade to me.

My experience is that occationally I can use the q or quit command to quit the
BSD mail.  But most of the time, just like looi mentioned above, the two commands
freeze my xterm or even console.  I can cntl-C to my heart's content without any
effect at all!  Our setup is quite similar to looi's, ie, NFS, and one nameserver,
mailer agent is sendmail too.

Another curious thing is that I am NEVER able to send mail to IBM Palo Alto 
even though it's next door to Stanford.  I can, however, always use my SUN SPARC
to send mails to IBM sites without a hitch.  Both use the same nameserver so why
is this?  

To get around my problem, I keep a remote xterm on my SPARC all the time just for
handling mails :-(.  Yes, I have elm, xmh, mh etc available but I am curious why
the default BSD mail wouldn't work as expected.

Thanks in advance for any hints.

Sincerely,

Chin Fang
Mechanical Engineering Department
Stanford University
fangchin at leland.stanford.edu