Date: Thu, 19 Dec 1996 14:26:41 +0100 (GMT+0100) From: af@biomath.jussieu.fr (Alain FAUCONNET) To: ttsai@pobox.com Cc: questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Freebsd for mail/shell server Message-ID: <199612191326.AA03396@iaka.biomath.jussieu.fr> In-Reply-To: <199612191159.FAA25460@edison.ebicom.net> from Tim Tsai at "Dec 19, 96 05:59:04 am"
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Tim Tsai wrote / a ecrit:
> Is anybody running FreeBSD with the mail directory mounted from
> another machine? If so, how do you keep from corrupting the mailboxes
> if NFS locking is not supported?
I have FreeBSD, Ultrix, HP-UX, SunOS, Solaris, AIX and NeXTstep boxes
with their mail spools NFS mounted for a HP-UX server. Corruption has
occured only a couple times in 5 years, and the culprit most probably
was the pop daemon.
NFS locking is not supported on some of the above machines (FreeBSD
among them). On other machines (AIX and NeXTstep) it seems
hopelessly broken.
>
> I want to support shell users but I would rather not have mail be on
> the same machine. Ideally I would have a dedicated mail machine and NFS
> mount the mail directory on the shell machine. Could this work?
Yes.
My rule is to use *only* mail user agents and mail delivery agents
that use and understand the most basic locking mechanism: dot file
locking i.e. creation of a /var/spool/mail/joe.lock file when
/var/spool/mail/joe is being accessed. Most mail user agents support
that, including elm if compiled with the proper options. My mail host
is a HP-UX box whose mail delivery agent is procmail. Procmail does
support dot file locking. I had to modify Qualcomm's POP daemon to
plug in dot file locking (just doing it for qpopper v2.2 right now).
Hint: given a mail user agent program, either check the sources or try:
strings [-a] binaryfile | grep \\.lock
To check if it understands dot file locking. If you get "%s.lock"
somewhere, chances are good that it does.
_Alain_
--
Alain FAUCONNET Ingenieur systeme - System Manager AP-HP/SIM
Public Health 91 bld de l'Hopital 75013 PARIS FRANCE
Medical Computing Research Labs Mail: af@biomath.jussieu.fr
Tel: (+33) (0)1-40-77-96-19 Fax: (+33) (0)1-45-86-80-68
I've RTFMed. It says: "Refer to your system administrator"
But... I *am* the system administrator :-]
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