Mutt hangs, Network Issue?
Hello,
I have a strange problem that is driving me nuts. Sorry if this is
long.
Background: I am a long time mutt user. I use it at home. I use it at
work. I get a lot of email. I love mutt.
The problem is at work. I routinely interact with several servers
(Linux and *BSD). I keep terminals with ssh sessions open to all
these. On one of these, I keep my personal mail spool (mbox). This is
a CentOS Linux server. The mutt version is mutt-1.4.1-12.0.3.el4.
So I connect from my Ubuntu Desktop via ssh to the server, and mutt
runs locally on the server. I do not use mutt for retrieving mail,
just reading mail from the spool.
This Mutt hangs/freezes probably 10-15 times a day. It is completely
unresponsive. If I open a second ssh session, and kill the mutt
process, it generally takes maybe 30 seconds for mutt to let go, and
to get a shell prompt back. If I don't manually kill mutt, and just
let nature take its course, the ssh session itself will eventually
time out and die, and I am dropped back to my local desktop. The
aggravation is killing me!
I have approximately 12 ssh session opens now, and three to this same
server where I use mutt. Many of these stay open for weeks, and
sometimes months without issue. The only one that is problematic is
the one with mutt. And only when mutt is running. The other ssh
sessions to this same server are 100% problem free.
This problem only started after we changed our local office router
that does NAT, DHCP, packet filtering, etc a few months ago. Other
than this one issue, the router is problem free, with approx 20 users
connected to it, using it all day long.
My suspicion is that there is some background network related stuff
that mutt is doing, that is breaking statefulness on the router, and
the network connection just hangs. But that is a wild guess. It may
turn out to be a network issue, but if so, mutt is the only thing
triggering it.
I am at a loss of how to troubleshoot this. Any ideas would be hugely
appreciated!
--
Hal Burgiss