.forward vs. NFS?

[Mike Khaw]

Why is it that when my .forward file contains just:

/pps/khaw/mail/incoming/inbox

(where incoming has mode 777 and inbox has mode 600), my diskless 3/60
never sees updates to the file, even though the file is correctly being
updated on the NFS server -- but if I change .forward to:

\khaw,/pps/khaw/mail/incoming/inbox

both /usr/spool/mail/khaw and /pps/khaw/mail/incoming/inbox appear to my
3/60 to update correctly, modulo NFS gremlins trashing my spool/mail file
every so often (that being the reason I wanted to forward my mail to a
different file and filesystem).

If it matters, both my 3/60 and the 3/260 server are running SunOS 4.0.3,
and I run olwm under OpenWindows 2.0FCS.

Mike Khaw
ParcPlace Systems, Inc., 1550 Plymouth St., Mountain View, CA 94043
Domain=khaw at parcplace.com, UUCP=...!{uunet,sun,decwrl}!parcplace!khaw