> So far all I'm getting is religious opposition to locking mailspools over
> NFS. While I do accept that, having some religious type beliefs about
> systems myself, I really want to know the details of the mechanics and
> issues involved. If the delivering processes use a seperate lockfile, and
> the presence of that lockfile indicates that another process is delivering
> to that file, why is that not reliable? Is it possible that creation of a
> file by one process might not be immediately visible on another system?
> I've heard of something called lockd - what is that, does it help, should
> I run it? How does procmail interact?
lockd implements lockf() (not flock(), at least not on our systems)
across NFS. You should definitely run it, but if you have a fairly
standard NFS setup, you probably already are. It is usually implemented
as an RPC service, though, so you will probably not see a separate
"lockd" process or anything like that.
>
> The sendmail->exim conversion conflicts aside, ideally once this is an
> all-exim system I would really like to be able to reliably do local
> deliveries on multiple machines. Single point of management is cool.
> Single point of failure sucks.
You could of course view Exim's relaying merely as an alternative to NFS
for writing data the the disk on a different machine. Or to put it in a
different way: You aren't really delivering locally anyway, since you
are writing to NFS mounted directories. But apart from that, I think
this discussion has gone far enough.
--
- T. Lund
--
*** Exim information can be found at
http://www.exim.org/ ***
