Thanks to all to answered. Majority said its perfectly okay to nfs mount
/var/spool/mail. They have been doing it for years.
You just need to make sure the mount is hard and actimeo=0.
Answers are attached.
-- Gautam
attached mail follows:
I always mount mail. Make sure you do not do a soft mount. The
mount options should be: -rw,hard,intr,nosuid
Don't cache mount mail either.
You can also change your sendmail.cf on the clients to receive mail
on the server, instead of their workststion. As the server tends
to be more stable there is less missed mail, as when a workststion
is down for some reason, or has changed names.
Rick
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Rick Reineman
Lasers CAD&UNIX Systems Management
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
reineman1@llnl.gov
> From sun-managers-relay@ra.mcs.anl.gov Tue Dec 2 03:16 PST 1997
> Sender: sun-managers-relay@ra.mcs.anl.gov
> Date: Tue, 02 Dec 1997 11:51:18 +0200
> From: Gautam Das <gautam@bwc.org>
> To: Sun Managers List <sun-managers@ra.mcs.anl.gov>
> Subject: nfs mounted /var/spool/mail
> Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
>
> Is there a chance of flakiness if /var/spool/mail is nfs mounted?
> Any known problems?
>
> Clients are SunOS 4.1.3 , NFS servers are 4.1.3 and Solaris 2.6.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Gautam
>
attached mail follows:
On Tue, 2 Dec 1997, Gautam Das wrote:
> Is there a chance of flakiness if /var/spool/mail is nfs mounted?
> Any known problems?
>
> Clients are SunOS 4.1.3 , NFS servers are 4.1.3 and Solaris 2.6.
>
Yes, there is a good chance of flakiness. File locking over NFS has always
been somewhat problematic, and I wouldn't be surprised if mixing OS
version makes things worse. If your users really want to be able to read
mail from a remote server with a client running on the local machine, I
would suggest you install an POP or IMAP server on your mail server
(personally I think IMAP is the right way to go, and POP is an
abomination, but your mileage may vary) and deploy a POP/IMAP capable
client like the Solstice Internet Mail Client or Netscape Communicator
4.0.
benji
--
Benjamin R. Cline Harrison & Troxell, Inc. benji@hnt.com
Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes?
attached mail follows:
;-) Due to massive amounts of caffeine & sleep deprivation, Gautam Das said:
>Is there a chance of flakiness if /var/spool/mail is nfs mounted?
>Any known problems?
>
>Clients are SunOS 4.1.3 , NFS servers are 4.1.3 and Solaris 2.6.
This also depends on what MTA you're running (mail daemon... i.e. sendmail,
qmail, etc.)
If you're running any type of sendmail, or if you're running qmail with
_Mailbox_ support, then you definately do run the risk of corrupting
mailboxes with multiple deliveries due to inadequate file locking across
NFS. However, if you are running qmail with /Maildir support, then file
locking is not required and it's perfectly safe to mount the mail
directories (as Qmail's default is to store the user's mail directories in
their own home directory) via NFS.
I'll be honest: Qmail is _not_ a direct Sendmail replacement... a few
programs need to be patched to run with qmail, configuring qmail is much
easier (you don't need a book, unlike sendmail) qmail has been proven
perfectly secure so far (there's a $1000 reward if you can get a program to
run on the machine as someone other than yourself because of qmail -- it
hasn't been collected yet) and it's an order of magnatude faster than
sendmail -- an Intel 486DX2/66 with 32Megs RAM, IDE hard drive, Linux and
Qmail will outperform a Pentium 133 with 64Megs RAM, SCSI hard drive, Linux
and sendmail... found that out myself!
I've been running a beta Qmail for 18 months with no security or any other
problems -- If you want, check it out at www.qmail.org for more info.
Hope this helps,
Roger "Merch" Merchberger
-- Roger Merchberger | Why does Hershey's put nutritional Programmer, NorthernWay | information on their candy bar wrappers zmerch@northernway.net | when there's no nutritional value within?
attached mail follows:
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
>>>>> "Gautam" == Gautam Das <gautam@bwc.org> writes:
Gautam> Is there a chance of flakiness if /var/spool/mail is nfs
Gautam> mounted? Any known problems?
That's how I run it for a couple of Sparc/Solaris 2.5.1 machines, and
I've had no problems in over a year. I used one of the O'Reilly books
as a reference when I set it up, and that pointed out making sure that
the vfstab file mounts the mail directory rw,hard,noac for proper
behavior. This is what I use.
Hope this helps,
CJW
- --
**********************************************************************
/\ Colin J. Wynne Johns Hopkins University
(()) Dep't of Mathematical Sciences
/____\ ``Lunatic-at-Large'' E-Mail: cwynne@mts.jhu.edu
/______\
/________\ ``Remember, this thing [the Internet] is based on decent-
ralized military software meant to withstand WWIII.''
---(rmiller@pic.net), posted in r.a.s.t.b5
**********************************************************************
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attached mail follows:
On Tuesday, December 02, 1997 4:51 AM, Gautam Das [SMTP:gautam@bwc.org] wrote:
> Is there a chance of flakiness if /var/spool/mail is nfs mounted?
> Any known problems?
>
> Clients are SunOS 4.1.3 , NFS servers are 4.1.3 and Solaris 2.6.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Gautam
We have it mounted here... no problems, as long as in the vfstab file the entry
looks like:
machine:/var/spool/mail - /var/spool/mail nfs - yes actime=0
====================================================
Patrick Patterson Tel: (514) 335-3015 x228
Network Systems Analyst Fax: (514) 335-1614
General DataComm - Multimedia Research Center E-Mail: sys-admin@gdc.ca
attached mail follows:
obviously you must mount it with option "hard" if you expect
to avoid data loss/corruption. other than that, it should
work reasonably well except for the problems caused by user
root trying to write mail locally and failing because of
the nfs root->nobody default conversion on NFS mounts. the
fix for that it to forward root mail on all client machines
to the mail server, which usually works.
> From sun-managers-relay@ra.mcs.anl.gov Tue Dec 2 05:03:47 1997
> From: Gautam Das <gautam@bwc.org>
> Organization: Baha'i World Centre
> X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.04 [en] (X11; I; SunOS 5.6 sun4u)
> Mime-Version: 1.0
> To: Sun Managers List <sun-managers@ra.mcs.anl.gov>
> Subject: nfs mounted /var/spool/mail
> Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
>
> Is there a chance of flakiness if /var/spool/mail is nfs mounted?
> Any known problems?
>
> Clients are SunOS 4.1.3 , NFS servers are 4.1.3 and Solaris 2.6.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Gautam
>
attached mail follows:
We do it....no problems,
Make sure you do this:
actimeo=0
in the options like so:
mailmachine:/var/mail - /var/mail nfs - yes hard,intr,bg,actimeo=0
Roger
attached mail follows:
I personally am quite uncomfortable with a mounted /var/spool/mail, but it is a
very common practice. Many years ago I was the software engineer responsible for
all email software for a major workstation vendor. The code for many of the
programs manipulating the mail spool files was very intolerant of network
issues, never checking return codes under the assumption that if the program ran
at all, then the local disk (i.e. the disk hosting the mail spool) was working
fine. There were race conditions that on occasion could cause a user's entire
incoming messages file to be lost. In practice, this did not appear to happen.
Since, I've been administering a number of Unix systems, most recently Solaris
2.5 (and SunOS 4.1.3), and haven't seen any problems with a mounted mail spool.
I DO see an occasional problem with my own email, loosing a couple of new
messages every once in a while, but I think the problem is CDE 1.0.1's dtmail.
For what I do, this has not be a big problem, but I think it confirms that Sun's
email code base is similar to that I had maintained.
-Marc
Marc S. Gibian
COMSYS Information Technology Services phone: (617) 377-6350
PRISM/TFS email: gibian@stars1.hanscom.af.mil
or is it: gibian@hanscom.af.mil
well, maybe: gibianm@hanscom.af.mil
and if all else fails: marc.gibian@acm.org
attached mail follows:
No flakiness, been doing it for several years,
although I've noticed the serving
host wants the actimeo parameter to be set, as in:
ldn71:/var/mail - /var/mail nfs - yes actimeo=0
attached mail follows:
Hello,
we nfsmount /var/spool/mail on /import/mail from an AlphaServer to
DECUNIX 4.0B and Solaris 2.5 clients without any problem.
You just have to setenv MAIL to be /import/mail/$USER .
Christophe.
***
Christophe DIARRA
Institut de Physique Nucleaire
Bat 100 - S2I
91406 ORSAY Cedex
Tel: (33) 01 69 15 65 60
Fax: (33) 01 69 15 64 70
E-mail: diarra@ipno.in2p3.fr
***
On Tue, 2 Dec 1997, Gautam Das wrote:
> Is there a chance of flakiness if /var/spool/mail is nfs mounted?
> Any known problems?
>
> Clients are SunOS 4.1.3 , NFS servers are 4.1.3 and Solaris 2.6.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Gautam
>
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