Network-wide Mail Spool?

[Rick Gunderson]

In <924 at iiasa.UUCP> wnp at iiasa.AT (wolf paul) writes:

>I would like some comments/advice on the feasibility of having a
>central mail spool directory for all users on a UNIX LAN, which
>would be cross-mounted to all machines.

>I have users who log in on different machines at different times,
>but expect to be notified by their shell or biff when new mail for
>them arrives, regardless of where they are logged in.

On Sun386i machines running SunOS 4.0.2, $USER can have her/his mail delivered
straight to their home directory (/home/$USER/mail/inbox). This means that no
matter where $USER logs into, he/she can read their mail because (at least
under SunOS) their home directories are always auto-mounted on the host on
which they login.

The /bin/mail program in SunOS 4.0.2 consults a yellow pages map called
``policies'' that (among other things) determines if mail should be delivered
to /home/$USER/mail/inbox to the (usual) /usr/spool/mail/$USER file on the
machine that exports the /home/$USER directory (I'll call this machine the
``homehost'').

Unfortunately, on non-Sun386i Sun workstations, the /bin/mail program is "dumb"
and always delivers to /usr/spool/mail/$USER on the homehost machine (which
causes the hassle that you are trying to avoid) :-(.

Why Sun didn't supply the Sun386i-style of /bin/mail with their other
workstations is anybodies guess.

>... We are currently using
>sendmail, but are thinking about switching to smail3.

One suggestion would be (since you say you are running sendmail) to fix your
sendmail.cf file so that _local_ mail deliveries are not handled by /bin/mail
but are handled by a program that you write called (say) homemail.

The homemail program could then deliver mail sent to $USER in
/home/$USER/mail/inbox rather than to the /usr/spool/mail/$USER that /bin/mail
always delivers to.

Another suggestion would be to simply export the /usr/spool/mail/$USER file
so and mount it on every machine that $USER logs in on. Mail delivery would
still always be done on the homehost of $USER (via sendmail) and $USER could
read his/her mail file on any machine on which it is mounted.


Good luck!

Rick

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