gnu@hoptoad.uucp (John Gilmore) (01/26/86)
Sid's mail solution is more robust, since if the other machine is
down, the "rsh" will just time out and drop mail, while if sendmail
is used to reroute the mail, it will queue it locally and retry every
hour or so. Something similar should be done for "inews", like
spooling the message to a directory on the local machine (which is
remote-mounted by the central machine) and then doing an rsh to the
central machine asking that it be processed. If the rsh fails,
a crontab entry can find it spooled and handle it later.
I'm not sure if "biff" will work if your mail is delivered on the other
machine, since it depends on getting a datagram from /bin/mail which
only goes to the local machine.
Note that centralizing /usr/spool/mail on one machine means that
when the machine goes down, no mail moves anywhere, and even old mail
is unreachable.
--
# I resisted cluttering my mail with signatures for years, but the mail relay
# situation has gotten to where people can't reach me without it. Dammit!
# John Gilmore {sun,ptsfa,lll-crg,nsc}!hoptoad!gnu jgilmore@lll-crg.arpawoof@psivax.UUCP (Hal Schloss) (01/28/86)
In article <439@hoptoad.uucp> gnu@hoptoad.uucp (John Gilmore) writes: >Sid's mail solution is more robust, since if the other machine is >down, the "rsh" will just time out and drop mail, while if sendmail >is used to reroute the mail, it will queue it locally and retry every >hour or so. Something similar should be done for "inews", like >spooling the message to a directory on the local machine (which is >remote-mounted by the central machine) and then doing an rsh to the >central machine asking that it be processed. If the rsh fails, >a crontab entry can find it spooled and handle it later. Well I agree that I would be better off if I did things that way. Unfortunately I don't have enough time to learn enough to rewrite our sendmail.cf files. As for news, I am afraid that I will never have the time to rewrite enough things to follow your suggestions. As it is, the NFS client system here is very dependent on the NFS server. The client has almost no /etc/passwd, there is only an entry for root. So if the master system is down, the way the Yellow Pages seem to be almost working will cause the slave to have so many other problems as to make the mail and news problems appear trivial. (There are NO printers on the client machine either, all such output devices are on the master system.) -- Hal Schloss (from the Software Lounge at) Pacesetter Systems Inc. {sdcrdcf|ttdica|group3|scgvaxd|nrcvax|mc0|bellcore|logico|rdlvax|ihnp4}! psivax!woof ARPA: ttidca!psivax!woof@rand-unix.arpa