Q: uucico is being uncooperative.  Specifically, if someone polls my machine, my machine hangs up the phone (the other side typically sees this after the second

	imsg looking for SYNC<

message in the debug output).  When I poll that same machine, uucico provides a core dump, after a segmentation fault.  What's stranger still is that polling some machines works fine, and those machines can poll mine!

Q: uucico is crashing when it tries to transfer files other than mail.  Mail comes through fine, but a file transfer won't.  What's wrong?

A: The likely problem is that you have improperly formatted UUCP configuration files.  For example, blank lines in your L.sys file can cause the first symptom, and malformed lines in your USERFILE can cause the second..  The UUCP system can't handle these.

In the case of the blank L.sys line, if the line is entirely emptyÐno spaces, no tabs, just emptyÐuucico works fine.  However, if the line contains only whitespaceÐspaces and tabsÐthen uucico crashes.  Remove the blank lines, or, if you like white space in your L.sys file, replace the blank lines with otherwise-empty comment lines.

In addition, if expected fields are missing, uucico has been known to crash.  For example, the following L.sys entry will crash uucico:

	¼ \
	"" ATdt555-1212 \
	ogin:~20- -ogin:- -ogin: name \
	ssword: YouKnowWhat

What was desired in this case was to send a newline if the prompt ogin: was not received.  What happened instead is that uucico was looking for the next expect string in the expect-send sequence, and it wasn't there.  To accomplish this, use the following instead:

	¼ \
	"" ATdt555-1212 \
	ogin:~20-CR-ogin:-CR-ogin: name \
	ssword: YouKnowWhat

In the case of a malformed USERFILE, check for lines with a missing space.  The format of USERFILE is

	[user],[system] directory

You must have the space between the user,system and the directory.  (Yes, user and system are both optional.  The comma between them and the space following them are not.)

One other thing which can cause uucico to fail (silently on the remote, with a bus error locally) is if the programÐwhich runs SetUID uucp and SetGID daemonÐdoes not have appropriate access to the UUCP spool directory, /usr/spool/uucp.  Ensure that the user uucp can read, write, and search (ªexecuteº) the spool directory.  Recommended permissions are 755 (read, write, execute for the user; read, execute for the group; read, execute for others).

QA508

Valid for 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, 3.1