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- Newsgroups: comp.sys.apollo
- Path: sparky!uunet!utcsri!helios.physics.utoronto.ca!alchemy.chem.utoronto.ca!system
- From: system@alchemy.chem.utoronto.ca (System Admin (Mike Peterson))
- Subject: Re: Mail and NFS 2.3
- Message-ID: <1992Jul30.034451.16681@alchemy.chem.utoronto.ca>
- Keywords: mail sendmail nfs os10.4
- Organization: University of Toronto Chemistry Department
- References: <807@ceco.ceco.com>
- Date: Thu, 30 Jul 1992 03:44:51 GMT
- Lines: 51
-
- In article <807@ceco.ceco.com> chris@ceco.ceco.com (Chris Icide) writes:
- >
- >I am currently having a couple problems which seem to related. My
- >configuration is as follows: DN3550 24MB, OS 10.4, NFS2.3.
- >
- >1) Our site is using a sun as both the site's name server and mailserver.
- > The DN3550 works perfectly fine with the name server, and I am able
- > to mount the sun's exported file systems with no problems. The user
- > id's on the sun and apollo match (unix id #'s and names, groups, orgs,
- > etc.). Users are able to read and write from the mounted file systems.
- > Sendmail is currently set up to deliver mail to the mail server whether
- > the intended addressee account is on the DN3550 or elsewhere. This works
- > just fine. /usr/spool/mail is a remote file system (/var/spool/mail) on
- > the sun. (Main environment for users is bsd4.3 /bin/csh)
-
- You are really asking for trouble linking your mail spool areas, because
- you do not have proper file locking between mail readers and sendmail
- putting new mail into a user mailbox, or between multiple sendmails
- if you get your scheme to work. This scheme only worked on Domain
- due to the proper file locking across the network. For NFS, 'lockd'
- was supposed to do this, but many NFS implementations either lack
- 'lockd', or the 'lockd' supplied doesn't work (e.g. on Suns without
- the lockd patch).
-
- The only safe way to run mail seems to be to have a /usr/spool/mail
- (or /usr/mail on HP-UX) on each node which is willing to actually
- receive mail. What most sites seem to do (and what we do) is to
- have a central mail receiver, which many other systems point to
- with their MX nameserver records (make sure you have MX set properly
- if you expect mail to be received on that node). Each user can then
- use .forward to send their mail to their desired system (which
- better not have its MX record pointing back to the central system!).
- Or, you just have everyone read their mail on the mail server :-(.
-
- > Problems:
- >
- > If I try to set up sendmail to allow delivery to the DN3550, I run into
- > a number of problems:
- >
- > o Mail delivered from other nodes recieve a Sendmail message:
- > "Deferred, connection refused" when trying to deliver mail. The
- > mail never gets through.
-
- Make sure your sendmail is responding correctly - use telnet to port
- 25 and you can talk to it with commands like HELO, MAIL, RCPT, ...
- to see that it is giving out proper FQDNs, etc. On the Apollo,
- you can also use 'mail -v' for interactive delivery, so you can
- watch the dialog.
- --
- What are the chances that any computer system will ever "work" properly?
- ... and Slim just left town. -*- Mike Peterson, SysAdmin, U/Toronto Chemistry
-