On Tue, 22 Oct 1996 09:57:43, Jae-young Kim <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> We're considering creating a AFS-based mail spool...
> There are two different solutions...
> The first solution is to deliver mails to each user's home
> directory...
> The second solution is to delver mails to a central AFS-based mail
> spool directory...
If you have a very large number of users, the central AFS-based spool
directory is probably not a good idea. First, it places too many things
in one directory, causing quota and access problems. It would be better
to have a subdirectory for each user, which will speed access and
allow separate ACLs for each user. Quotas will still be a problem.
If the mail spool directory is on one fileserver, no mail can be
delivered while that machine is out of service, which has been a
serious consideration for my cell.
I implemented delivering mail to each user's home directory. The
delivery agent needs to have AFS knowledge, but the readers (such as
elm) can be changed with little if any effort.
> We encounters some problems such as file locking, ACL setting,
> MUA recompiling, user tranining, etc.
I advise using only locking by lock file, since neither flock nor
lockf will work across all platforms. With respect to ACLs our solution
requires system:administrators or a mail group to have all access,
and users themselves to have write access at least. Then the reading
programs (like elm) do not need to know about ACLs. I have had problems
with users taking away the mail write access from their directories,
which simply prevents them from receiving mail. No special user
training should be necessary.
On our system all outgoing mail has its addresses rewritten to come
from afs.mcc.ac.uk, which has an MX record pointing to the receiving
machine. A few utilities try to bypass the mail system and write
directly to /usr/spool/mail; you just have to disable or correct
these.
A version of our stuff (slightly out of date) is in
/afs/transarc.com/public/afs-contrib/src/manch-cc/mail-delivery.
-- Owen
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
