Re: flexfax: mail to fax gateway: mailer died with signal 13

["Eloy A. Paris" <eparis@ven.ra.rockwell.com>]

Hi,

Phil Watkinson <pkw@elgro.co.uk> wrote:

: This problem has cropped up in this mailing list before; however, no
: solutions have been posted. David Wooley in an email dated 3 Oct 97
: thought that on Linux it meant :

Oppsss, my apologies then. I'm new to the list :-)
:
: >that a write to a pipe failed because a downstream reader closed it
: >prematurely.  It is also SIGPIPE on SCO Unix, so it is probably fairly
: >standard.)
:
: I did a grep of the HylaFAX sources and didn't find an exit(13) in there,
: so I do not think it is faxmail or others.

Uhhmmm...

Well, I grep'ed Sendmail's sources for this "mailer died with signal
xxx" message. Guess what: the "13" is not in decimal, it's an octal
number (syserr("451 mailer %s died with signal %o", ...) ).

So, to me it looks like faxmail is dumping core because of a
segmentation fault (13 in octal is 11 in decimal and it corresponds to
SIGSEGV).

Yes, I know about the infamous signal 11 problem and that it almost
always relates to hardware problems. However, this machine has been up
for a couple of years with no problems at all, so in this case I
_really_ doubt it is a hardware problem. It must be something in
faxmail, I guess.

: The probable area to have a look is either the calling of the 
: notify script or procmail if you are using procmail as the local 
: mail delivery agent.

Indeed, procmail is my local delivery agent but I don't understand
what it has to do in this case. Sendmail uses the mailer called "fax"
to do the final delivery, not the "local" mailer (which happens to be
procmail).

I mentioned procmail in my original post because I wanted to show you
all that everything was working fine _but_ faxmail when called
as a sendmail mailer. What I did was to create this recipe for
procmail:

:0
* Subject.*fax
| /usr/bin/faxmail -n -d eparis@9412863 root

However, I have just found out that calling faxmail from this
procmail recipe also causes the "mailer died with signal 13" error.

: For notify, you should be able to see invocation of the script in your
: system logs  -  this extract is from my /var/log/messages :

Well, my log looks like this:

sendmail[1671]: OAA01671: from=root, size=52, class=0, pri =30052, nrcpts=1,
msgid=<199804061854.OAA01671@polux.ven.ra.rockwell.com>, relay=root@localhost
HylaFAX[1675]: Filesystem has SysV-style file creation semantics.
FaxQueuer[112]: SUBMIT JOB 58
sendmail[1673]: OAA01671: SYSERR(root): mailerfax died with signal 13
sendmail[1673]: OAA01671: to=eparis@9431645.fax, ctladdr=root (0/0), 
       delay=00:00:02, xdelay=00:00:02, mailer=fax, relay=9431645,
       stat=Deferred
FaxSend[1682]: MODEM BOCA RESEARCH INC V.34 External/V1.510-V34_DS
FaxSend[1682]: SEND FAX: JOB 58 DEST 9431645 COMMID 000000 53

This was after "mail -s Test xxx@123445".

: In summary, its 'general troubleshooting mode' on this one, and I hope
: there is something in the above which will help. 

I agree. I think I'll have to fill faxmail with printf's and see where
it is crashing.

The problem is that I can't find any core dump file, "find / -name
core -type f" gives nothing.

: Please let us know how you get on; the answer deserves an entry in the
: FAQ.

I'll let you know what I find.

: Good luck,

Thanks, I'll need it.

Regards,

E.-

-- 

Eloy A. Paris
Information Technology Department
Rockwell Automation de Venezuela
Telephone: +58-2-9432311 Fax: +58-2-9431645