[EMAIL PROTECTED] (Arnoldo Araya) writes:
> Hi,
> We have configured e-mail system over AFS using an unique spool mail.
> All of users can access his spool mail logging to any host.
> Smail daemon is addressed into AFS file system for all host in the environment,
> but the daemon is frecuently down.
>
> Somebody has similar experience with it ?, Which one configuration is
> more robust to e-mail system?
Speaking as someone who's done it, putting /usr/spool/mail into AFS is
just asking for trouble. When it works, it works OK - but when it
fails, it fails horribly. For instance, /bin/mail doesn't understand
that any delivery failure could be temporary, which causes bounced
mail if your fileserver with /usr/spool/mail on it happens to be down
while a piece of mail is being delivered to a user.
The fact the AFS ACLs are per-directory, rather than per-file, makes
security difficult (but not impossible - you can hack around the ACL
problem by doing tricky things with symbolic links).
Here, we use AMS (the Andrew Mail System), and it's associated
delivery system. It's much more robust in the face of the temporary
failures you can see in a distributed environment.
--Pat.
