Re: Mailbox corruption under 2.3.18ac7

John Kennedy (jk@csuchico.edu)
Fri, 24 Sep 1999 05:59:47 -0700


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On Fri, Sep 24, 1999 at 05:00:41AM -0700, John Kennedy wrote:
> I had some problems like that with 2.3.18ac6 or ac7 but my changes
> weren't isolated to just the kernel so I couldn't isolate any single
> culprit during the timeframe. I haven't seen the same problem when I
> reverted back to 2.2.13pre9 and now 2.2.13pre11. ...

Further thoughts... it had to be 2.3.18ac6 since ac5 and ac7 didn't
detect my 3com/vortex card and I fetchmail via ethernet.

> In my particular case, I pull email via fetchmail, it gets fed into
> sendmail, and sendmail uses procmail to deliver it locally (and stuff
> it into my various mailboxes using my .procmailrc). I read with mutt.
>=20
> I wasn't seeing garbage, but I was seeing truncated email that was
> obviously missing the message body and only had enough of the header to
> make it into my mailbox.

Truncated email had a "From ", but no "From: " where I noticed it
(mainly because it looked like it was from *me* since it was being bounced
via procmailrc of a different computer). It didn't have a received-by
header from sendmail, which it should have had if the (only) problem
was with fetchmail.

I sorely abused all of the kernels mentioned by rebuilding my homebrew
linux distribution. I don't think this was an I/O problem or some kind
of disk-cache corruption or anything, because I would probably have hit
it compiling. I do a lot more of *that* (vs. email) on this box. The
truncated individual messages were small and didn't look like multiples
of block-sizes. I wouldn't say that I had a good sample rate though.

Sendmail could have lost the received-by header inside of itself since
it tends to write it to disk by default (before it hands it off to
procmail or another local mail delivery agent). Headers and message
body are stored in two different files, though, and I seemed to be
missing a lot of the headers and all of the body.

Hard to say about procmail. Whole mailbox didn't seem to be corrupted,
just the individual email. It is possible that I'm better behaved since
fetchmail only injects new email at 5-minute intervals. It would be in
a position to truncate the whole message since it is all one file when
it is handed off to procmail. On the other hand, there are a whole lot
of unknowns up to the point it is handed off to procmail.

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