Date: Fri, 7 Jun 1996 15:50:41 -0600 From: Nate Williams <nate@sri.MT.net> To: "Karl Denninger, MCSNet" <karl@mcs.com> Cc: pst@shockwave.com (Paul Traina), security@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: FreeBSD's /var/mail permissions Message-ID: <199606072150.PAA00803@rocky.sri.MT.net> In-Reply-To: <m0uS9Nx-000IDOC@venus.mcs.com> References: <199606072105.OAA00533@precipice.shockwave.com> <m0uS9Nx-000IDOC@venus.mcs.com>
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Karl Denninger writes: > > Mail locking, to be effective, must be soley performed through the use of > > the flock() call on the mail file itself. > > > > Locking schemes relying on other mechanisms are not effective. > > > > Sorry. > > Mail locking, to be effective, must *work across machines* so that NFS > mounts of the mail directory work. > > flock() cannot be trusted to work in this environment, and in fact doesn't > even attempt to work on FreeBSD. > > Does this mean we should give up on using mail? Actually, *nothing* works reliably across NFS locks if you don't have lockd, and since FreeBSD doesn't (yet) have lockd you shouldn't have mailboxes that can be written to by multiple processes on different systems. There are *VERY* few systems (including most of Sun's) that implement reliable NFS file-locking well. Sun attempted it many times and failed. :( Nate
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