From owner-freebsd-hackers Thu Oct 30 19:14:34 1997 Return-Path: Received: (from root@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.7/8.8.7) id TAA05479 for hackers-outgoing; Thu, 30 Oct 1997 19:14:34 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from owner-freebsd-hackers) Received: from misery.sdf.com (misery.sdf.com [204.244.210.193]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.7/8.8.7) with SMTP id TAA05457 for ; Thu, 30 Oct 1997 19:14:22 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from tom@sdf.com) Received: from tom by misery.sdf.com with smtp (Exim 1.73 #1) id 0xR7Vm-0002GZ-00; Thu, 30 Oct 1997 19:12:38 -0800 Date: Thu, 30 Oct 1997 19:12:37 -0800 (PST) From: Tom To: Joe McGuckin cc: hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Mail servers & NFS locking? In-Reply-To: <199710302005.MAA27740@monk.via.net> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk On Thu, 30 Oct 1997, Joe McGuckin wrote: > I want to have a seperate machine as a sendmail/pop email server. > I've heard that on some OS's this can scramble mailboxes if NFS locking > doesn't work. > > For FreeBSD, what is the preferred method to do this? Can I just NFS mount > the mail directory on the user machines? Does NFS locking work? The prefered way is IMAP. I've setup a site with a dedicated mailbox server that is completely closed (13,000 mailboxes), with the only access via POP and IMAP. This limits client selection a bit, but client support is growing. Way better than messing about with NFS and standard UNIX bezerk mailboxes. The worst about mounting /var/mail elsewhere is not NFS locking (which doesn't work right in FreeBSD, however dotlocking is ok), but making sure all the clients are using the correct locking mechanism. If you don't, someones going to lose mail. A good example is an NFS mount scenario where flock() isn't effective (ex. FreeBSD), and the client doesn't get a dotlock, and doesn't notice that something else has a dotlock... oops. > Thanks! > > Joe Tom