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- Newsgroups: comp.sys.sun.admin
- Path: sparky!uunet!stanford.edu!leland.Stanford.EDU!camis.Stanford.EDU!mtm
- From: mtm@camis.Stanford.EDU (Mike Macgirvin)
- Subject: Re: NFS automounted home directories and .forward files
- Message-ID: <mtm.714151696@CAMIS>
- Sender: news@leland.Stanford.EDU (Mr News)
- Organization: DSO, Stanford University
- References: <1992Aug18.002726.29236@blaze.cs.jhu.edu> <1992Aug18.115450@cs.utwente.nl>
- Date: 18 Aug 92 15:28:16 GMT
- Lines: 36
-
- helthuis@cs.utwente.nl (Bert Helthuis) writes:
-
- >|> My problem is that whenever mail for a
- >|> user comes in; the server machine has to automount their home directory in
- >|> order to determine if they have a .forward file. This is particularily
- >|> annoying when a mass mailing occurs, because then the server goes off and
- >|> automounts all the home directories of everybody in the department.
-
- >I too would be interested in such ideas. We have a similar setup but
- >want the .forward processing __on the user's machine__, not on the
- >mail server because of expected load problems. Some of us here
- >have scripts to inspect their /usr/spool/mail/ file but this appears
- >to produce a lot of traffic when this is done on all our machines.
-
- >Do you have an elegant solution ?
-
- >Bert
-
- What we did here was to provide a level of abstraction in the
- alias mechanism. Our alias system is built automatically from "source"
- files, which are copied from each server, and munged to produce NIS
- domain wide aliases of the form "foo: foo@hostnn". Each server has its
- own local alias database which uses the normal alias mechanisms. This
- way, all machines can receive mail for any address in the domain, but
- only that which owns the filesystem referenced by the mail spool,
- include file, pipe, archive, whatever can deliver it. There are many
- reasons why mail delivery should avoid NFS; most notably the painful
- history of Sun's locking mechanisms, but also the unpredictable
- behaviour of some remote mailers when an NFS server hangs. This
- doesn't exactly fit your network model, i.e. we ensure that each
- user's home directory server is their mail machine, and provide
- distributed mail via IMAP; but it may be food for thought.
-
- "mike" (Mike Macgirvin) Mike_Macgirvin@CAMIS.Stanford.EDU
- Unix Server Administrator CAMIS Computer Project
-
-