Date: Mon, 30 Jun 1997 17:18:13 -3100 (MST) From: Terry Lambert <terry@lambert.org> To: tom@sdf.com (Tom Samplonius) Cc: chuckr@glue.umd.edu, lmcsato@lmc.ericsson.se, freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: NFS V3 is it stable? Message-ID: <199707010018.RAA10515@phaeton.artisoft.com> In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.3.95q.970630162824.16263A-100000@misery.sdf.com> from "Tom Samplonius" at Jun 30, 97 04:30:32 pm
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> > Samy, are you using NFS to mount the mail sppol directories? Since nfs > > locking isn't in a very good condition, it's almost guaranteed to fail. > > The mail directories are accessed bot for mail delivery and mail pickup, > > and reliable locking is a top requirement. > > I've had sites report that even going Solaris to Solaris using the > Solaris propietary lockd stuff, they still can get trashed mailboxes. > Locking of any kind over NFS just isn't reliable. This is only true if your NFS violates the NFS write guarantees, which SVR4 and Solaris do, by default. Turn off write gathering and write caching (the "adb" commands are listed in the Network Administration Manual) and the problem will go away. Note that FreeBSD's lockd doesn't enforce locking; it lies and grants the lock in all cases, mostly to shut up diskless SunOS/Solaris clients booting from FreeBSD boxes. Server locking kernel patches (rpc.lockd still needs fixes on top of them) have been available for some time now. > Use IMAP as an alternative. Set up your mail server as a IMAP server, > and use Pine, Simeon (www.esys.ca), or Netscape 4 on your clients. Netscape is a known rogue client. Among other things, it does not cache the correct seperator character on a per "#xxx" namespace escape. So if you were reading news in "#news" (seperator "."), and went to create a new mail folder, it wouldn't use "/" as the component seperator when communicating the new forlder path to the server. Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers.
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