Popper Fix for SCO 5.0.7

When we installed OpenServer 5.0.7, we found that there was a problem with the popper. It was leaving files in the /tmp directory after each person had popped their email. That alone was just an annoyance and it has been reported on the web already. The real problem was that when the user tried to pop their email again later, some of them were getting the message that their email was "being read by another session." When we removed the temporary file associated with the user that was having problems, the problem went away. I suspect that it is because the PID in the temporary file was being reused, but don't have proof of that.

Searches on the web indicated that SCO knew about the temporary file problem and were due to fix the problem in the next release. We didn't find anything referring to the other-session problem. A call to SCO just to _try_ to get an update would have cost us $1800, so we passed on that. (We don't have to call but maybe once a year, so it isn't worth keeping an active support contract.)

We tried to replace the 5.0.7 popper with the popper that was from a 5.0.5 system. That resulted in a licensing error.

We downloaded ftp://ftp2.sco.com/pub/skunkware/osr5/vols/qpopper-3.1-VOLS.tar and installed it. That resulted in an authentication error. A look through the INSTALL file indicated that the error was because of a configure error prior to compiling. We downloaded the qpopper tar to a development system. We reconfigured qpopper with './configure --enable-specialauth' to enable the use of shadow files. (Which I thought had been used on every SCO system since Xenix?!?!) We copied /opt/K/SKUNK2000/Qpopper/3.1/usr/local/src/mail/qpopper3.1/popper/popper from the development system to the 5.0.7 system and the popper problems went away.

The only other setup to do on the 5.0.7 system was an entry in /etc/inetd.conf. We commented out the old popper and added a popper line like this: 'pop3 stream tcp nowait root /usr/local/lib/popper qpopper'. We also had to restart inetd (kill -HUP `cat /etc/inetd.pid`). The installation instructions recommend the '-s' argument, but that adds a line to the syslog each time someone pops their email, and we weren't interested in that.

More Articles by Tom

Take Control of Your Domain Names

Jump to Comments

Many of the products and books I review are things I purchased for my own use. Some were given to me specifically for the purpose of reviewing them. I resell or can earn commissions from the sale of some of these items. Links within these pages may be affiliate links that pay me for referring you to them. That's mostly insignificant amounts of money; whenever it is not I have made my relationship plain. I also may own stock in companies mentioned here. If you have any question, please do feel free to contact me.

Specific links that take you to pages that allow you to purchase the item I reviewed are very likely to pay me a commission. Many of the books I review were given to me by the publishers specifically for the purpose of writing a review. These gifts and referral fees do not affect my opinions; I often give bad reviews anyway.

We use Google third-party advertising companies to serve ads when you visit our website. These companies may use information (not including your name, address, email address, or telephone number) about your visits to this and other websites in order to provide advertisements about goods and services of interest to you. If you would like more information about this practice and to know your choices about not having this information used by these companies, click here.