Excerpts from mail: 2-Jul-94 Re: e-mail over AFS ! Marc [EMAIL PROTECTED] (427)
> Another option, if you don't want to deal with AMS (since it's a bit
> baroque) is to use a POP3 client, and not try to store your mail
> spools in AFS.
> Marc
If you have the luxury of AFS and simplicity of POP, you can marry the
two and benefit from each simply by keeping your home mailfolders in AFS
(perhaps this is what you're suggesting above). This gives backup,
security, host location independence and mail quota management to an
inexpensive, easily manageable and maintainable mail system. Add
kerberized POP clients to the picture, and you have a nice, fairly
secure, clean, scalable mail system.
But what about POP access from PCs and Macs? You could try linking to a
virtual AFS drive using PC/NFS and an AFS translator host, but that's
neither clean nor secure. Direct authenticated access using native
protocols from a PC or Mac to a UNIX-based NOS server running AFS and
hacked to map NOS authentication to AFS authentication might be forth
coming, but its not available today.
What might be ideal would be to use IMAP instead of POP, and place the
IMAP mail store in a distributed file space. That way, any client,
regardless of platform, could connect to any IMAP server to read and
send mail. This in effect would provide a distributed mail access
service, similar in functionality to AMS, but without the overhead and
without mail client and server AFS dependencies. Off-the-shelf,
commercially available or public domain servers and clients could be
used to build an inexpensive, secure, highly scalable mail system for
the enterprise.
AFS isn't a good candidate for this kind of application, mostly because
ACLs operate on a per directory, rather than per file basis. Fudging
the spooling area with links and mounts and what have you to effectively
accomplish file-level security is a mess.
What about DFS? Will it be possible to store a generic UNIX mail spool
in DFS, assigning unique DFS ACLs to each UID? Can each user name in
the spool directory be its own DFS volume? Is anybody interested in
this type of setup?
-Bob
