On Sat, Jan 23, 2021 at 08:33:11AM -0700, [email protected] wrote: > > Anyone out there still using Alpine mail client with 6.8? > > Used Alpine for 20 years or more, and recently set up a new mail server. > Old one used to be on a 5.3 OpenBSD version. > > New one works fine in every respect for reading and saving incoming messages, > going to subfolders, but after composing a message it hangs as soon as I give > the ^X to send it. Have to close the X-window to get rid of the session, and > then kill the hanging task PID with a kill -9 > > The basic "Mail" email client works fine -- and I am using it here, > but it doesn't have the conveniences I am used to. > > Any suggestions appreciated. > > -- Austin
Hi Austin, Here is how I would go about debugging this. ktrace, it's a powerful tool. ktrace -i alpine it and do what you normally do and then kill -9. When that's done use kdump to trace back where the SIGKILL signal killed it. It's usually at the end. So if you do kdump | less and press 'G' no quotes it will go right to the end. From there scroll up, to see where it may be hanging. You could be useing kdump -TR as well to see relative time since start of the program... One warning through ktrace will fill up a file called ktrace.out relatively quickly. A ktrace -C ensures that all ktraces are stopped in the system if you suspect it's still ongoing. To check that kdump -l perhaps or just ls -l ktrace.out. You will be faced with every system call made by alpine including forks and execution of other programs, so if you send mail it's possible that you see the sendmail wrapper binary and any other binaries that are executed. Do have a good look at the ktrace and kdump manpages before doing my advice though. Another warning is not to share that data, which makes it difficult to debug if you don't know this set of programs. It's private data and noone should have an insight of what your mailbox looks like. So it's difficult... Another advice I have is perhaps keep an eye on dmesg, perhaps you're hitting a constraint somewhere? Best Regards, -peter
