Re: [Exim] .forward permissions

On Mon, 19 Jul 2004, Kjetil Torgrim Homme wrote:

> yes. we need this in our environment, if a NFS server is down and the
> automounter gives up, we get 'permission denied'. in that case, we want
> to queue the message until the server is back up, since we can't know
> whether the message should be forwarded or not

Indeed. On our mailer we've approached the problem in a different
way: we require the forward file to be local to the mail server. But
because we don't let users log on to the mail server itself, we export
the area r/w to local client nodes (e.g the login server) so that they
can edit the file themselves.

Unfortunately, because user home directories are somewhere else
entirely, this means that the file can't simply be ~/.forward which is
what any experienced user would expect.

So it's not an ideal solution. I suppose we could forcibly create
symlinks for ~/.forward in users' home directories, pointing at the
real "forward" files, but I haven't thought that through. Or maybe we
could synchronise the two via rsync. Instead, we rely on RTFM, and
occasionally responding to user complaints "I created my .forward but
nothing is happening". We're small enough that we can get away with
that, but I won't pretend it'd be viable for a big operation.

Still, although it wasn't me who actually took the decision, it seems
a good one to me: I'm much happier with all mail-critical files being
local to the mail server, than having to rely on NFS for successful
mail function. I don't mind the *users* having to rely on NFS for
their occasional configuration updates, if you see what I mean.