mikem+@andrew.cmu.edu (Michael Meyer) (09/04/89)
I have a local collection of machines (decstation 3100's running Ultrix
3.1, each with a local disk) and I would like to implement a "common"
mailbox on all of these machines. The idea is to allow a user to log
into any machine and be able to see their mail.
At the moment I do not want to use the YP services.
What I would like to do is have /usr/spool/mail on each machine be a
symbolic link to (say) /SERVER/usr/spool/mail where /SERVER is a NFS
mounted disk partition. On the server machine I want to run a regular
sendmail that accepts incoming mail in the usual way. On the client
machines I want to have a sendmail that can send out mail, but
"forwards" all incoming local mail to the server machine and also
delivers outgoing local mail to the server. I do NOT want the client
sendmails ever dropping mail in /usr/spool/mail -- I'm sure there would
be times when two sendmails are trying to write to the same file.
(I'm using the latest version of sendmail from berkeley; it is important
that my sendmail be able to access hosts with MX entries.)
Does anyone else do anything like this? Does anyone have any
suggestions on what I need to do to the sendmail.cf files to implement
this.
I'd appreciate any and all advice.
Regards,
Michael M. Meyer
Statistics
Carnegie Mellon University.avolio@gildor.dco.dec.com (Frederick M. Avolio) (09/07/89)
On your client machines, everywhere that it looks to give mail to the local mailer, change those lines to send mail to the server machine via tcp/ip or however you are connected. Fred
gamiddleton@watmath.waterloo.edu (Guy Middleton) (09/07/89)
In article <cZ0Smk200YU5A4CUUX@andrew.cmu.edu> mikem+@andrew.cmu.edu (Michael Meyer) writes: > I have a local collection of machines (decstation 3100's running Ultrix > 3.1, each with a local disk) and I would like to implement a "common" > mailbox on all of these machines. The idea is to allow a user to log > into any machine and be able to see their mail. > At the moment I do not want to use the YP services. > > ... > > Does anyone else do anything like this? Does anyone have any > suggestions on what I need to do to the sendmail.cf files to implement > this. We do this, sort of. Our setup is on Suns, but that doesn't really matter. There is an MX record for each client, so mail is sent to the server instead. Only the server runs a sendmail daemon. For local delivery, the client sendmail does delivery, without going through the server. I know you don't like this, but it really isn't a problem; if you have people reading their mail on a client, you need to do file locking anyway. Two sendmails at once is the same as a sendmail and a user reading his mail and writing the mailbox back. The advantage of doing it this way is that server and clients can share a common config file. I could send you a copy of our sendmail.cf if you like. We use an IDA sendmail, so things may look a bit strange.