Date: Wed, 25 Oct 1995 13:21:40 -0400 (EDT) From: Robert N Watson <rnw+@andrew.cmu.edu> To: freebsd-questions@freefall.FreeBSD.org, Jason Brazile <jason@sunra.csci.unt.edu> Subject: Re: Question: Sharing mail spool Message-ID: <YkXb8Yy00YUs0FuEkf@andrew.cmu.edu> In-Reply-To: <199510192218.RAA08802@sunra.csci.unt.edu> References: <199510192218.RAA08802@sunra.csci.unt.edu>
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The best answer I came up with for a similar situation was to use pine
as the mail reader, and set the default inbox for all users the
{mailserver}inbox, and set up imapd on that system. The users have to
use the imapd login procedure again (in pine) to get to the inbox, but
it appears to work fine. I'm not sure how the sent.mail stuff would
work -- that might have to be imap'd as well. Another possible answer
is use of pop and an X mail reader of some kind that support it (I'm not
sure which mail readers, X or otherwise, support imap and pop.)
If you wanted an Xable answer, maybe you could implement an rsh alias
that essentially loaded up an xterm with the mail reader, actually
executing on your mail server. There doesn't appear to be a simple file
sharing answer that comes to mind though, unless the locking stuff in
nfs starts working.
Excerpts from internet.computing.freebsd-questions: 19-Oct-95 Question:
Sharing mail spool Jason Brazile@sunra.csci (1162)
>
> 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
----
Robert Watson (rnw+@andrew.cmu.edu) * Double major: IDS/CS * H&SS
http://www.watson.org/ robert@fledge.watson.org
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