AIX 1.2 for PS/2, SendMail/NFS problems

[Jack F. Vogel]

In article <1012 at cameron.egr.duke.edu> amr at dukee.egr.duke.edu (Anthony M. Richardson) writes:
>I've had AIX 1.2 installed for about a week.  It's really nice, with a
>lot of nice extensions to 1.1.
 
>Here's one problem which I would like to get fixed and am appealing to
>the net for help.
 
[ ... description of having HOME directory NFS mounted deleted...]

>... I suspect the problem might
>be do to a problem in SendMail/bellmail with reading/writing to
>$HOME/.newmail when $HOME is mounted over the network.
 
I can't cite exact APAR numbers but I know there were various NFS problems
in the base GA 1.2 system that have been fixed in service, I am not sure
if this problem would be fixed by them but I am quite sure that as you
suspect it is an NFS problem. I would suggest that you call IBM support,
describe the problem and ask for any service fixes that relate to NFS.

>Can anyone suggest a fix to the problem?  I've thought of the following...
 
>(2) Change something in sendmail.cf so that my mail gets written to
>/usr/spool/mail/amr (or something) instead of $HOME/.newmail.
>This is an acceptable solution, but I have no idea what to change
>in sendmail.cf to accomplish this.
 
Well, you are close but not quite right on. Sendmail does not take care
of local delivery so it doesn't know anything about your mailbox. What
does is the program bellmail, it is written to deliver to $HOME/.newmail.
Unfortunately, there is no way that I know of to change this specific
behavior, however there is a relatively simple solution to your problem.
Simply create a .forward file in your home directory with the absolute
path of the file you wish mail delivered to (something not NFS mounted,
like /usr/mail/tony) and that should eliminate the problem. Oh yes, I
would not suggest using /usr/spool/mail due to the fact that /usr/spool
is a symlink to <LOCAL>/spool and thus would be a different directory
depending which machine in the TCF cluster you are logged into. Of course
if you aren't using TCF then this won't matter.

Hope this helps you out.

Disclaimer: Me speak for LCC, much less IBM, you must be kidding :-}!

-- 
Jack F. Vogel			jackv at locus.com
AIX370 Technical Support	       - or -
Locus Computing Corp.		jackv at turnkey.TCC.COM