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Date:      Thu, 19 Oct 1995 17:18:21 -0500
From:      Jason Brazile <jason@sunra.csci.unt.edu>
To:        questions@freebsd.org
Subject:   Question: Sharing mail spool
Message-ID:  <199510192218.RAA08802@sunra.csci.unt.edu>

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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




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