Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!husc6!rutgers!sun-barr!sun!trantor!smarks
From: smarks%trantor@Sun.COM (Stuart Marks)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.mh
Subject: Re: inc loses mail when file system full
Summary: make sure you mount writable NFS filesystems "hard"
Keywords: inc, write failed, file system full
Message-ID: <104715@sun.Eng.Sun.COM>
Date: 13 May 89 06:39:32 GMT
References: <1875@ccncsu.ColoState.EDU> <1884@ccncsu.ColoState.EDU>
Sender: news@sun.Eng.Sun.COM
Reply-To: smarks@sun.UUCP (Stuart Marks)
Distribution: usa
Organization: Sun Microsystems, Inc.
Lines: 27

In article <1884@ccncsu.ColoState.EDU> steved@longs.LANCE.ColoState.Edu (Steve Dempsey) writes:
> I usually use a workstation where my home is remote
> mounted with NFS.  This is when I have problems.  But if I use the
> machine where file system physically resides, inc does recognize the
> error and aborts, leaving the mail drop intact.

This is just a guess, but make sure that the filesystem on which your
home directory resides is mounted "hard".  That is, the line in your
/etc/fstab should look something like:

	host:/usr/host /usr/host nfs rw,hard,bg,intr 0 0

and not:

	host:/usr/host /usr/host nfs rw,soft,bg,intr 0 0

If the fileserver goes down or there's a network glitch, the hard mount
will wait until the request is satisfied, while the soft mount will even-
tually timeout and return an error.  The upshot is that soft-mounted file-
systems will return errors much more frequently and hard-mounted ones.
This tends to trip up a lot of programs.  Who knows, maybe "inc" isn't
as bulletproof as we've been led to believe.

s'marks
Stuart Marks			ARPA: smarks@sun.com
Window Systems Group		UUCP: {decwrl,ucbvax}!sun!smarks
Sun Microsystems, Inc.