From owner-freebsd-questions Thu Dec 19 05:34:09 1996 Return-Path: Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.8.4/8.8.4) id FAA22234 for questions-outgoing; Thu, 19 Dec 1996 05:34:09 -0800 (PST) Received: from shiva.jussieu.fr (shiva.jussieu.fr [134.157.0.129]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.8.4/8.8.4) with ESMTP id FAA22136 for ; Thu, 19 Dec 1996 05:32:58 -0800 (PST) Received: from tom.biomath.jussieu.fr (tom.biomath.jussieu.fr [134.157.72.8]) by shiva.jussieu.fr (8.8.4/jtpda-5.2) with ESMTP id OAA11755 ; Thu, 19 Dec 1996 14:27:00 +0100 (MET) Received: from iaka.biomath.jussieu.fr (iaka.biomath.jussieu.fr [134.157.72.20]) by tom.biomath.jussieu.fr (8.8.4/mailhost/jtpda-5.2/af961211) with SMTP id OAA17717 ; Thu, 19 Dec 1996 14:26:43 +0100 (WET) Received: by iaka.biomath.jussieu.fr (5.67b/jf930126) at Thu, 19 Dec 1996 14:26:42 +0100 From: af@biomath.jussieu.fr (Alain FAUCONNET) Message-Id: <199612191326.AA03396@iaka.biomath.jussieu.fr> Subject: Re: Freebsd for mail/shell server To: ttsai@pobox.com Date: Thu, 19 Dec 1996 14:26:41 +0100 (GMT+0100) Cc: questions@freebsd.org In-Reply-To: <199612191159.FAA25460@edison.ebicom.net> from Tim Tsai at "Dec 19, 96 05:59:04 am" X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4ME+ PL19 (25)] Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-questions@freebsd.org X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk 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 :-]