From owner-freebsd-questions Wed Oct 25 10:23:41 1995 Return-Path: owner-questions Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.6.12/8.6.6) id KAA29098 for questions-outgoing; Wed, 25 Oct 1995 10:23:41 -0700 Received: from po2.andrew.cmu.edu (PO2.ANDREW.CMU.EDU [128.2.10.102]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.6.12/8.6.6) with ESMTP id KAA29085 for ; Wed, 25 Oct 1995 10:23:36 -0700 Received: (from postman@localhost) by po2.andrew.cmu.edu (8.6.12/8.6.12) id NAA15421; Wed, 25 Oct 1995 13:23:14 -0400 Received: via switchmail; Wed, 25 Oct 1995 13:23:09 -0400 (EDT) Received: from unix16.andrew.cmu.edu via qmail ID ; Wed, 25 Oct 1995 13:21:43 -0400 (EDT) Received: from unix16.andrew.cmu.edu via qmail ID ; Wed, 25 Oct 1995 13:21:41 -0400 (EDT) Received: from Messages.8.5.N.CUILIB.3.45.SNAP.NOT.LINKED.unix16.andrew.cmu.edu.sun4c.411 via MS.5.6.unix16.andrew.cmu.edu.sun4c_411; Wed, 25 Oct 1995 13:21:40 -0400 (EDT) Message-ID: Date: Wed, 25 Oct 1995 13:21:40 -0400 (EDT) From: Robert N Watson To: freebsd-questions@freefall.FreeBSD.org, Jason Brazile Subject: Re: Question: Sharing mail spool In-Reply-To: <199510192218.RAA08802@sunra.csci.unt.edu> References: <199510192218.RAA08802@sunra.csci.unt.edu> Sender: owner-questions@FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk The best answer I came up with for a similar situation was to use pine as the mail reader, and set the default inbox for all users the {mailserver}inbox, and set up imapd on that system. The users have to use the imapd login procedure again (in pine) to get to the inbox, but it appears to work fine. I'm not sure how the sent.mail stuff would work -- that might have to be imap'd as well. Another possible answer is use of pop and an X mail reader of some kind that support it (I'm not sure which mail readers, X or otherwise, support imap and pop.) If you wanted an Xable answer, maybe you could implement an rsh alias that essentially loaded up an xterm with the mail reader, actually executing on your mail server. There doesn't appear to be a simple file sharing answer that comes to mind though, unless the locking stuff in nfs starts working. Excerpts from internet.computing.freebsd-questions: 19-Oct-95 Question: Sharing mail spool Jason Brazile@sunra.csci (1162) > > We have a "cluster" of FreeBSD machines and we want them to share the > same mail spool. > > I understand that FreeBSD doesn't have NFS locking yet so I was trying > to think of ways to get around the obvious problem. > > Currently, we have set up a mail hub and all "client" machines just > forward incoming mail to it - hence there is only one machine's sendmail > writing to the spool which is a disk local to that machine (i.e. that it > can lock). > > So as far as delivery is concerned, I think we are OK. But I see a > remaining problem where clients nfs mount the mail spool directory > and mail user agents not running on the mail hub could have problems > with the mail hub's sendmail process. > > Any suggestions? > > The only thing I could think of was to see if sendmail could support > lock files (instead of flock/lockf) and only allow mail user agents > that adhere to the same lock file protocol. Of course, it seems like > there still could be problems because of nfs client side caching. > How do you guys get around this problem? > > Thanks in advance. > --- > Jason Brazile jason@sunra.csci.unt.edu > "People say I'm apathetic but I don't care" brazile@math.utexas.edu ---- Robert Watson (rnw+@andrew.cmu.edu) * Double major: IDS/CS * H&SS http://www.watson.org/ robert@fledge.watson.org