Quoth Ben Parker on Wed, Sep 30, 1998:
> Is it a "bad idea" to let more than one server append mail to a shared
> NFS-mounted /var/spool/mail/user mail spool directory.?
On our site the mail is delivered to a /var/mail partition over
NFS. We have no problems with this. If you set use_lockfile and
require_lockfile (both are set by default), there is no problem
with delivery via NFS and co-existance with other programs which
change the mailboxes, as long as those programs use file locking.
I don't know a mailer daemon or a mail reader which doesn't use
file locking (i.e., create the file /var/mail/user.lock to signal
that /var/mail/user is busy). Maybe you will have to unset
use_fcntl_lock when you deliver via NFS. It depends on whether
your Linux NFS client and your NFS server support fcntl file
locking via NFS. In our environment, we had to unset the option.
We have no problem with deliveries over NFS. It was told here
that NFS sucks in Linux. Maybe, I don't know. But what we are
talking about is not the NFS suckiness, but the fact that exim
locks the file in the manner which is understood and respected by
other programs, and other programs use the same mechanism for
mailbox locking, which exim understand and respects, too. See
chapter 15.2 of exim spec for details.
And don't get confused bu the /var/mail notation. The mail spool
directory is called /var/mail on some systems and /var/spool/mail
on others.
Vadik.
--
It was state of the art, he said.
The art in this case was probably pottery.
-- Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, "Good Omens"
--
*** Exim information can be found at
http://www.exim.org/ ***
