From owner-freebsd-chat Sat Nov 23 20: 4:22 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 3EAE037B401 for ; Sat, 23 Nov 2002 20:04:21 -0800 (PST) Received: from HAL9000.homeunix.com (12-232-220-15.client.attbi.com [12.232.220.15]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 575F143E3B for ; Sat, 23 Nov 2002 20:04:20 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from dschultz@uclink.Berkeley.EDU) Received: from HAL9000.homeunix.com (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by HAL9000.homeunix.com (8.12.6/8.12.5) with ESMTP id gAO44HUf002105; Sat, 23 Nov 2002 20:04:17 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from dschultz@uclink.Berkeley.EDU) Received: (from das@localhost) by HAL9000.homeunix.com (8.12.6/8.12.5/Submit) id gAO44GCf002104; Sat, 23 Nov 2002 20:04:16 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from dschultz@uclink.Berkeley.EDU) Date: Sat, 23 Nov 2002 20:04:16 -0800 From: David Schultz To: Brad Knowles Cc: Terry Lambert , drew-dated-1038498271.901d05@poured.net, freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Sharing calendars? Message-ID: <20021124040416.GA2037@HAL9000.homeunix.com> Mail-Followup-To: Brad Knowles , Terry Lambert , drew-dated-1038498271.901d05@poured.net, freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG References: <3DE00781.F47E59A1@mindspring.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: Sender: owner-freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Thus spake Brad Knowles : > At 2:56 PM -0800 2002/11/23, Terry Lambert wrote: > > > Why are soft updates bad for mail queues, in your opinions? > > In general, softupdates are very good for mail queues. Indeed, > this is the case for which softupdates is almost ideal. > > However, both qmail and exim make some assumptions about the > underlying filesystems which are not valid when those filesystems are > using softupdates. Therefore, if you are going to use either exim or > qmail on *BSD, you need to turn off softupdates on the respective > mail queue partitions. Then they're making assumptions that are not valid for many filesystems. This is not a difficult problem to solve: If you want to ensure that a certain file has been committed to stable storage before you proceed, you use fsync(2). I thought most mailers did this. As a side note, someone pointed out to me a while ago that Linux has an incorrect implementation of fsync(2), such that the parent directory of the fsync'd file isn't guaranteed to be written. Maybe they fixed that by now, but that could be one situation in which you have to be more careful. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message