Federico Grau <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote on Mon, 04 Sep 2000:
> - why would one choose flock or fcntl?
I don't know the details about the locking methods, but I guess there
isn't really any technical reason to prefer either flock, fcntl or
dotlock over another. The most important thing is that both your MDA
(mail delivery agent, in this case procmail) and your MUA (mail user
agent, Mutt) are using the same locking mechanism. And also, any other
program that accesses your email should use the same kind of locking
too.
If the locking methods are not the same, then you risk mail folder
corruption.
The problem is that over NFS, locking has been traditionally very
unreliable. Apparently still is.
> - could there be some negative repercussions from my current selection?
Well, it depends what kind of locking procmail uses. If procmail uses
fcntl and Mutt is configured to use flock, you might as well not be
running any locking at all.
> - any other insights on how to correct/stop these nfs locking errors?
Yes. I recommend you stop using mbox and start using Maildir. After
that, you won't need to worry about locking at all on your NFS-mounted
folders. Maildir has been designed especially for NFS-mounted folders
and doesn't require locking to be safe. With Maildir, you can just
ignore the file locking-over-NFS headaches.
Mutt supports Maildir natively, and so does the latest version of
procmail (3.14).
Regards,
Mikko
PS. Please set "use_domain" in your .muttrc, or teach your MTA to
also rewrite your address in the Mail-Followup-To header.
--
// Mikko H�nninen, aka. Wizzu // [EMAIL PROTECTED] // http://www.iki.fi/wiz/
// The Corrs list maintainer // net.freak // DALnet IRC operator /
// Interests: roleplaying, Linux, the Net, fantasy & scifi, the Corrs /
Be nice to other people. They outnumber you 6 billion to one.
