Pine not reading ~mail folder

[Lawrence]

I'm on Linux and the mail folder is in my home directory (which is
stored via NFS).

For some reason pine is no longer showing folders from the ~mail
directory. If I go into pine and look at the folders it only shows
INBOX. However if I start pine and tell it to open a mail folder name
by -f then it is able to open it. Such as: pine -f Sent. It also works
if I go into Pine and then tell it to goto a folder and type in a
name.

This is my configuration setup for the folders:

Nickname : Mail
Server :
Path : mail/
View :

It has been working fine like this for a long time, just the other day
after I restarted the servers this problem happened.

Lawrence

[Andreas Prilop]

On Tue, 14 Aug 2012, Lawrence wrote:

> For some reason pine is no longer showing folders
> from the ~mail directory.

“~mail” is not the same as “~/mail”.

[lgo...@gmail.com]

Thanks for the fast response.

In my message I typed it wrong, but the configuration I sent is what I am using. It can open mail folders only if I type the name to goto a folder. From my shell, I can see the directory contents of ~/mail if I do "ls", however pine doesn't see the directory listing for some reason when showing local mail folders.

Lawrence

[J.O. Aho]

Check your ~/.pinerc for folder-collection settings

One liner:
folder-collections=remote-mail
{host_name_or_ip/ssl/novalidate-cert/user=remote_username}[], local-mail
/home/mail/mail/[]

A miss configuration here, for example havng

local-mail [/home/mail/mail/]

would give the effect you describe.



This should fix your issue, you can also try with
One liner:
newmail-fifo-path=/tmp/mail.pine.fifo

as there can be times when NFS causes issues (I haven't had any for the
years I have had my /home as a NFS share).

--

//Aho

[Lawrence]

Thanks. The configuration file seems correct, as it works fine from
one computer. The other computer acts odd. Here are straces:

This is from the computer that works fine:
2558 stat64("/u/goetz/mail/", {st_mode=S_IFDIR|0700,
st_size=4096, ...}) = 0
2558 open("/u/goetz/mail/", O_RDONLY) = 7
2558 read(7, 0xbfece130, 1023) = -1 EISDIR (Is a directory)
2558 close(7) = 0
2558 stat64("/u/goetz/mail/", {st_mode=S_IFDIR|0700,
st_size=4096, ...}) = 0
2558 stat64("/u/goetz/mail/", {st_mode=S_IFDIR|0700,
st_size=4096, ...}) = 0
2558 gettimeofday({1345143833, 797758}, {240, 0}) = 0
2558 stat64("/u/goetz/mail//.mxindex", 0xbfecf26c) = -1 ENOENT (No
such file or directory)
2558 getdents64(6, /* 20 entries */, 32768) = 624
2558 stat64("/u/goetz/mail/SPAM.msf", {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644,
st_size=1089, ...}) = 0
2558 gettimeofday({1345143833, 799519}, {240, 0}) = 0
2558 rt_sigprocmask(SIG_BLOCK, [ALRM], [], 8) = 0
2558 rt_sigprocmask(SIG_SETMASK, [], [ALRM], 8) = 0

and so on till it does a close(6)

This is from the computer that doesn't work properly:
32580 stat64("/u/goetz/mail//.mxindex", 0xbfffa48c) = -1 ENOENT (No
such file or directory)
32580 getdents64(6, /* 20 entries */, 32768) = 624
32580 close(6)

Both show 20 entries, but one doesn't list anything for them. If I
change the link where my mail is stored to another nfs server, then
the mail works from any computer. I am not sure if it is the original
nfs server or the client. As most clients work fine with the nfs
server.

The nfs server for the mail is running Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server
release 6.3 kernel 2.6.32-279.2.1.el6.x86_64 and is running nfs-
utils-1.2.3-26.el6.x86_64

The client having problem is running an old system 2.4.21-57.ELsmp

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks,

Lawrence

[J.O. Aho]

Lawrence wrote:

> Both show 20 entries, but one doesn't list anything for them. If I
> change the link where my mail is stored to another nfs server, then
> the mail works from any computer. I am not sure if it is the original
> nfs server or the client. As most clients work fine with the nfs
> server.

If switching server, with no other change on the client than the server name
in the mount, then it's the server, iptables rules or a firewall in between
which causes the issue.

A none working portmap could cause some issues, but that is usually a lot more
than just files not found.

Do check if you have a lot of dropped packages or errors on the NICs, it can
give a clue which machine you need to check more closely.

> The nfs server for the mail is running Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server
> release 6.3 kernel 2.6.32-279.2.1.el6.x86_64 and is running nfs-
> utils-1.2.3-26.el6.x86_64
>
> The client having problem is running an old system 2.4.21-57.ELsmp

Thats a quite old kernel and could have some NFS related bugs, I can think it
managed to be quite many fixes from the release of 2.4.21 till end of life of
kernel 2.4 7.5 years later (I know there are some backports in the version you
are using).





--

//Aho