followup: stuck lmtpd processes

[Rob Siemborski]

On Wed, 24 Sep 2003, Henrique de Moraes Holschuh wrote:

> Agreed, but if we are going to keep the blocking-on-lock behaviour (and I
> know we are ;-)), we really, really should have a way to timeout and kill
> the process if that lock does not release after a while.
>
> Resilience IS necessary... As an admin, I want to know there are problems
> from syslog events, not because the whole system stopped.  Right now, at
> least in Linux (which DOES have kernel/glibc bugs in that area) that means
> we end up needing the slow-as-hell backoff non-blocking locks stuff.

As I understand it (based on your comments to Bug 1177), just setting an
alarm() around the flock/fcntl calls isn't good enough to solve the Linux
problem.

-Rob

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Rob Siemborski * Andrew Systems Group * Cyert Hall 207 * 412-268-7456
Research Systems Programmer * /usr/contributed Gatekeeper