Re: Fed up with NFS-mounted mail directories

[Peter Lister, Cranfield Computer Centre]

Bob Dew <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> says:

> Does anyone use a kerberized POP implementation with AMS that has a
> distributed means for notifying users of new mail arrival?  (AMS uses
> the ATK "console" program to monitor home-area mail delivery -- a
> valuable user function that would be lost in a POP implementation of
> messages).  Somebody mentioned using zephyr datagrams for mail
> notification, but the learning curve for installing zephyr on an
> enterprise scale is also fairly steep.

Zephyr actually seems quite simple, and is probably the most trouble
free of the Athena services. We have a DECathena set up, using KPOP and
Zephyr notification of delivery top the post office. The mail delivery
is completely outside AFS, except for the binaries and configs (/usr/{bin,lib}/mh).

It's worth pointing out that zwgc (the Zephyr client) has a very
powerful programming language for configuration of messages and the
actions on receiving them, and I quickly set up a very neat system
which allows users who are listening for POP deliveries (i.e. everyone
by default) to have zwgc run inc, automagically pulling in their mail
as it arrives, and piping the output of in to a windowgram. The default
mail browser is dxmail, which doesn't notice the new message
immediately, but it does check every few minutes, and whenever the user
presses "Read New Mail"

Interestingly, this setup is not part of DECathena, but when I spoke to
a DEC developer, he said, Oh yes, that's what he did too. Since zwgc is
running with the Kerberos ticket/token, it has no problem pulling the
message and dropping it in the user's home directory; the mail delivery
system has no access to the user's files, so it can't get to a strongly
authenticated file system like AFS.

Peter Lister                             Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Computer Centre, Cranfield University    Voice: +44 234 754200 ext 2828
Cranfield, Bedfordshire MK43 0AL UK        Fax: +44 234 750875
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