I would get around this by 'soft' mounting onto foo and bar. When the NFS
server becomes unavailable, Exim will attempt to access the file, the call
will return a failure, not block, and Exim will defer and wait for the next
queue run to try again.
This is pretty much how we do it here. One cavaet - Make sure you have a
fair bit of space on foo and bar so that in the event that they can't write
to the mailboxes, and they need to queue, there is enough room on the local
filesystems to handle the influx of messages. :)
Sincerely, Warren
-----
Warren Vanichuk, Senior Systems Engineer, Team Lead
Network Operations @ Look Communications Inc.
http://www.look.ca/
-----Original Message-----
From: Sherwood Botsford [
mailto:sherwood@Math.UAlberta.CA]
Sent: February 22, 2000 4:49 PM
To: Exim List
Subject: [Exim] Setting up robust systems.
I am trying to set up a fail safe system. (Ok, a not-quite-as-likely-to-fail
system)
Ideally I have two MX records, one pointing to foo, and one pointing to bar.
The actual mail spool is on zork. zork nfs exports it's spool to
foo, bar, and a couple labs of workstations.
I currently use procmail to do the the final transport to the spool
directory.
Now if either foo or bar fails, the other box picks up the load.
But if zork is down, then foo and bar hang, as they try to do nfs
reads of the user's home directories.
Is there any elegant way of dealing with this?
I saw the reference to require_files doing a stat() on the directory
of the file. But this is not obviously of help, since the user
directories are two levels removed from the mount point.
(/u/vega1 is the exported and mounted file system. A users directory
is /u/vega1/visitors/juser)
And doesn't the stat() call hang anyway?
Sherwood Botsford | sherwood@???
Sorcerers Apprentice | Math Dept, U of A, Edmonton, AB T6G 2G1
System Administrator | Tel: 780 492 5728
Trouble shooter | Fax: 780 492 6826
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