Excerpts from transarc.external.info-afs: 22-Nov-94 Re: news server in
AFS? "Perry E. Metzger"@imsi. (2343)
> > The difference is that news is a huge stream of read-once (if at all) data,
> > but mail is a smaller stream that tends to get stored away and re-read at a
> > future time.
> Partially true. However, I've found that using AFS as a means of
> distributing around rapidly changing data of any sort -- be it news,
> mail, or anything that alters a lot in the day -- is a bad idea.
Well, we'd have to agree to disagree, at least on the mail delivery
part. KPOP might be wonderful, but if you have to go to extremes to
shuffle mail around the enterprise to make it available ``locally,''
you've just re-done what you had to do to shuffle the AFS home
directories around.
All you have to do to get sendmail not to blow up on AFS mail delivery
is to dink with the program that it runs to deliver local mail, teaching
it to look for failures on the file system calls (like close()); if that
program exits with EX_TEMPFAIL, sendmail will happily keep a message
queued. Also, clearly, the sendmail local spool area should be on a
local disk, not in AFS. Of course, this is how AMDS expects to use
sendmail. AMDS also replaces the local-name lookup function, and gets
sendmail not to try to evaluate local mail addresses at all, but that's
another story.
But it doesn't seem to be a huge tax to deliver mail into AFS (into
directories under users' home dirs), as long as the delivery process
knows about the transient failure conditions that don't arise in a local
FS environment, and which are reflected via errors on system calls.
Craig
