biff (mail notification under AIX3.1.3002)

[Charlie McGuire]

In article <10236 at ncar.ucar.edu>, fredrick at acd.ucar.edu (Tim Fredrick) writes:
|> On our other UNIX machines, when new mail is received, the user's terminal
|> beeps and the first couple of lines of the message is displayed.

Biff can be enabled via smit. You can verify that it has been enabled by making
sure smit uncommented the comsat entry in /etc/inetd.conf. Users must also have
biff enabled using the biff y command.

We had biff running on our rs6000, but I had to turn it off because users were
getting notified of other users mail (including the first few lines displayed.)
I haven't had time to scope out ways to reproduce this, so I haven't
reported it.
Our rs6000 is heavily used as a time-sharing machine with 25-35 users
logged in 
running lots of stuff.

|> I can't seem to achieve this effect on the Risc-System 6000 (AIX3.1.3002).
|> Setting the mail environment variable to something like
|> "(30 /usr/spool/mail/fredrick)" causes "you have new mail" to display the
|> first time after 30 seconds you enter a new command.  But no bell, and no
|> subject line.

This facility is completely different than biff.


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* Charlie McGuire                    | INTERNET: mcguire at math.uiowa.edu   *
* Systems Programmer                 |           mcguire at cs.uiowa.edu     *
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