15-sec delay starting with remote pinerc

[Ed Swierk]

I succeeded in setting up a remote pinerc, and start pine this way:

pine -p {selini.stanford.edu/user=eswierk}.pine/pinerc

However, before I'm prompted for my IMAP password, pine pauses for 15
seconds. After the pause, everything works okay, but the delay is
annoying.

Setting ssh-open-timeout and rsh-open-timeout to 0 has no effect.

When I strace while running pine, it looks like it blocks on a select()
call after a vfork(). The timeout parameter is 15 seconds, as expected.

What's odd is that if I force strace to follow vforks by using the "-f -F"
parameters, then the select never gets called and the login prompt shows
up immediately.

I tried poking into the source code, to little avail.

Any help would be appreciated.

--Ed

--
Ed Swierk
eswierk...@cs.stanford.edu

[Ed Swierk]

Problem solved.

Turns out debugging pine is much easier if you get a version with
debugging enabled (the RedHat version doesn't even understand the -d
option).

For some reason, pine always tries rsh regardless of the local
rsh-open-timeout setting, if you are using a remote pinerc.

One way to force pine to skip rsh is to append :143 to the hostname, like
this:

pine -p {selini.stanford.edu:143/user=eswierk}.pine/pinerc

(Thanks to Francis Hartojo for pointing this out in his message dated
2000-02-26.)

--Ed

On Fri, 14 Sep 2001, Ed Swierk wrote:

> However, before I'm prompted for my IMAP password, pine pauses for 15
> seconds. After the pause, everything works okay, but the delay is
> annoying.
>
> Setting ssh-open-timeout and rsh-open-timeout to 0 has no effect.

--
Ed Swierk
eswierk...@cs.stanford.edu

[Steve Hubert]

Pine does not know about the rsh-open-timeout until after it has read the
config file.

--
Steve Hubert <hub...@cac.washington.edu>
Networks and Distributed Computing, Univ. of Washington, Seattle

On Fri, 14 Sep 2001, Ed Swierk wrote:

> Problem solved.
>
> [...]

[Ed Swierk]

Thanks, that explains the problem.

I expected pine to first initialize itself with the local settings (in
/etc/pine.conf or .pinerc or on the command line) before attempting to
connect to the IMAP server.

I think this behavior would be quite useful. Having to append :143 to
force pine to skip rsh seems kind of hacky and unintuitive.

--Ed

On Mon, 17 Sep 2001, Steve Hubert wrote:

> Pine does not know about the rsh-open-timeout until after it has read the
> config file.

--
Ed Swierk
eswierk...@cs.stanford.edu