mail deadlock

[phil cook]

Hello

One of our users is receiving this message when trying to retrieve mail:

lara:cssdba(51): mail
/var/mail/cssdba: Lockf deadlock detection
mail: can not lock on /var/mail/cssdba after 10 tries

Can anyone suggest a solution.

Thanks

[Rita C Workman]

My guess is that somehow there is something still open accessing this.
You can get lockf deadlock errors when the system is unable to give you exclusive rights to a file. In this case your user cssdba is trying to read their mail..and for some reason the file is presently active elsewhere.
So you could try using the fuser command to see if you can track down what process has the file open.

fuser -u /var/mail
This should give you the user and in params possibly the pid....

Just a one thought,

[phil cook]

Thanks Rita

We've had a call in at HP today & it would seem we need to reconfigure the nflocks kernel parameter which is a little awkward. Still looking into this but that is their opinion - I just unsure as to why this is suddenly happening on this machine - it's nice to see the whole picture i.e cause & effect.

Thank you for your response anyway.

Regards