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From: gnu@hoptoad.uucp (John Gilmore)
Newsgroups: comp.bugs.misc
Subject: Re: Multiple uucico's
Message-ID: <1318@hoptoad.uucp>
Date: Wed, 19-Nov-86 23:16:56 EST
Article-I.D.: hoptoad.1318
Posted: Wed Nov 19 23:16:56 1986
Date-Received: Thu, 20-Nov-86 03:13:34 EST
References: <7@esosun.esosun.UUCP> <470@cdx39.UUCP>
Organization: Nebula Consultants in San Francisco
Lines: 32

In article <470@cdx39.UUCP>, jc@cdx39.UUCP (John Chambers) writes:
> > I fire off a "uucico -r1" from cron every half-hour to clean out the
> > spool area...		     ...The logfile shows many "LOCKED
> > (system name)" messages all within several minutes of each other for
> > each of the systems we talk to.  There was some traffic going on at
> > that point.  Any ideas?
> >
> There's one way this can easily happen.  If machine X has received
> two or more mail messages to be forwarded to machine Y, uucico will
> start up a uuxqt daemon to process them, and each one will run rmail
> to forward the mail.  Each rmail will start up a new uucico to try 
> to push its mail message through.  It is highly likely that they
> will all run at the same time, and all but the first will generate
> the LOCKED (Y) message.  

There is a fix for this.  If you are calling uucico -r1 every half hour
anyway, there is no reason for rmail to fire up a uucico for each
mail message.  Change rmail to call "uux -r" rather than just "uux".
If you run sendmail, you can change this in the mailer definition
for uucp -- search for "Muucp" in sendmail.cf.  If you are on a binary
site without sendmail, you may be able to fake this by moving uux to
"uux.real" and making a small shell script for uux that just calls
the real one, adding the -r flag.  Some versions of Unix can't "exec"
a shell script though -- in that case, you go one more level and
write a little C program that does {system("uux.script");}, put the
shell script in uux.script, and put the C program in uux.  And complain
to whoever supplies your Unix system that they should fix both the
kernel (so it can exec shell scripts) and rmail (so it includes uux -r).
-- 
John Gilmore  {sun,ptsfa,lll-crg,ihnp4}!hoptoad!gnu   jgilmore@lll-crg.arpa
    "I can't think of a better way for the War Dept to spend money than to
  subsidize the education of teenage system hackers by creating the Arpanet."