AIX 1.2 for PS/2, SendMail/NFS problems

[Anthony M. Richardson]

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.

I mount a particular directory on another machine over a user directory
ala,

   mount bigdisk:/home/disk0/amr /u/amr

Everything seems to work fine after that except for mail.  If I just 
type "mail" the program hangs.  Also, after a while, the load on
my machine shoots way up and I notice that several "sendmail" and
"bellmail" programs have started up. (This was after I sent mail
to myself on my machine from another machine.  The file .newmail
is created but nothing is in it.)  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.

Can anyone suggest a fix to the problem?  I've thought of the following.

(1) Just mount bigdisk:/home/disk0/amr over a subdirectory in /u/amr.
This works (I think because /u/amr/.newmail is now a local file), but
is not what I consider a "clean" solution.  I really like to
logon to the various machines we have here and have the same
directory structure.

(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.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.
I read this group, so post answers if you think it is of general interest,
but I would also appreciate email replies.

Tony Richardson     amr at dukee.egr.duke.edu

   hoping soon this (^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^) will be amr at minnow.egr.duke.edu :-)