[no subject]

[Philip E. Agre <AGRE at MIT-AI>]

Foo.  This has happened to me three times in the last three days.  I send some
mail with Zmail, so it tries to write to AI:.MAIL.;MAIL >, but AI is down so
the Zmail background process gets an error.  I do Terminal-0-S and (silly me)
hit Abort and it seems happy.  But then when AI comes back up I try to save
my editor buffers and the machine just goes into "Lock" forever and sits there
staring at me with the cursor blinking.  So I go back into Zmail and write a
note complaining about it and when I try to send it (yes!) the same thing
happens.  So I save my buffers to MC (which works), boot my machine, read them
back in from MC and save them on AI (which works).  I infer that what is happening
is that there is some locative per host that the attempt to write out mail locks
and it isn't unwind-protected so that the Abort leaves it locked, and then the
lock prevents anyone else from writing to the host.