mutt + procmail + nfs...
ok, i have a mail server that also exports out /home. it has several raid disks is connected to an ups and is generally noisy so it lives in my utility room. my workstation lives in my office and it mounts /home from the mail server. sendmail invokes procmail to deliver my mail on the mail server. i'm thinking of having procmail deliver directly to ~/Mail/inbox. that way i could run mutt on my workstation. however, this is the dreaded mailbox on nfs issue. do procmail and mutt play nice on nfs? kevin -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to fork()'ed on 37058400the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier meatspace place: home than a sober one. the happiness of credulity is a http://ie.suberic.net/~kevin cheap dangerous quality -- g.b. shaw msg30003/pgp0.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: mutt + procmail + nfs...
On Wed, Jul 31, 2002 at 05:45:32PM +0100, kevin lyda wrote: ok, i have a mail server that also exports out /home. it has several raid disks is connected to an ups and is generally noisy so it lives in my utility room. my workstation lives in my office and it mounts /home from the mail server. sendmail invokes procmail to deliver my mail on the mail server. i'm thinking of having procmail deliver directly to ~/Mail/inbox. that way i could run mutt on my workstation. however, this is the dreaded mailbox on nfs issue. do procmail and mutt play nice on nfs? If you use Maildir, yes. -- Ralf Hildebrandt (Im Auftrag des Referat V A) [EMAIL PROTECTED] Charite Campus Virchow-Klinikum Tel. +49 (0)30-450 570-155 Referat V A - Kommunikationsnetze - Fax. +49 (0)30-450 570-916 This is the first age that's paid much attention to the future, which is a little ironic since we may not have one. -- Arthur Clarke
Re: mutt + procmail + nfs...
* kevin lyda [EMAIL PROTECTED] [2002-07-31 12:44]: however, this is the dreaded mailbox on nfs issue. do procmail and mutt play nice on nfs? Mutt and procmail both support Maildir natively. See http://cr.yp.to/proto/maildir.html. (darren) -- Patriotism is the last resource of scoundrels. -- Samuel Johnson
Re: mutt + procmail + nfs...
On Wed, Jul 31, 2002 at 06:46:55PM +0200, Ralf Hildebrandt wrote: however, this is the dreaded mailbox on nfs issue. do procmail and mutt play nice on nfs? If you use Maildir, yes. Maildir has the problem of trading NFS locks for excess synchronous meta-data operations, and synchronous meta-data operations are something not dealt with well by most NFS servers (at least, anything short of Auspex, EMC, or NetApp). There are alternative solutions. For POP3-based systems, Nick Christenson led the way in his Earthlink paper, _A Highly Scalable Electronic Mail Service Using Open Systems_, which you can find at http://www.jetcafe.org/~npc/doc/mail_arch.html. IIRC, they used file creation tricks (just like Maildir does), but instead of breaking out each message into a separate file, they used the v7 mbox file format. You still have some synchronous meta-data issues to deal with, but not nearly on the scale of Maildir, and even those can be at least partially addressed (start with http://www.shub-internet.org/brad/papers/dihses/lisa2000/sld065.htm of my invited talk _The Design and Implementation of Highly Scalable E-mail Systems_, which I presented at LISA 2000). For IMAP-based systems, you would need to use the message store engine from MessagingDirect (they hacked Cyrus so as to pull the locking out of the filesystem and into an NFS-friendly database). Alternatively, you would need to hack Cyrus to pull the file locking out into an NFS-friendly database. You may also be interested to read the book _Sendmail Performance Tuning_ by Nick Christenson -- to be published on September 20, I believe. While the title of the book is about sendmail, I believe that it covers more than just this one program. Disclosure: I was a technical reviewer of this book and Nick was my co-author for the talk I gave at LISA 2000, so I may be a bit biased. ;-) -- Brad Knowles [EMAIL PROTECTED] Senior Consultant for Snow bv ASM Lithography bv + ITMS Unix Competence Center + Room 02.D.2085 De Run 1110 + 5503 LA Veldhoven, NL + GSM +31 654 344 596
