[comp.mail.mh] MH on an NFS mounted mail spool... You can loose mail...

felix@ai.sri.com (Francois Felix INGRAND) (11/15/90)

(Sun OS 4.0.3)

All our mails are arriving on one machine, our mail server. The mail spool is
then NFS mounted by the clients.

Playing with our newly installed mh 6.7, I discovered that if I do a inc on a
machine which is NFS mounting the mail spool, then I can loose mail...

If you are using standard unix mail, you have the risk of not seeing the mail (as
the server and the client disagree for a while on the status of the mail file
in the spool), but for some reasons, inc seems to "clear" the spool file, even
if it was believed empty...

Is there any way to avoid this problem or fix this bug?

Thanks in advance,
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Francois Felix INGRAND                          SRI International, AIC
felix@AI.SRI.COM                                333, Ravenswood Avenue
(415) 859-5584                                  MENLO PARK, CA 94025, USA
"Read my Lisp... No new syntax" (nil)

khera@thneed.cs.duke.edu (Vick Khera) (11/15/90)

In article <FELIX.90Nov14160728@cayucos.ai.sri.com> felix@ai.sri.com (Francois Felix INGRAND) writes:

   From: felix@ai.sri.com (Francois Felix INGRAND)
   Date: 15 Nov 90 00:07:28 GMT

   All our mails are arriving on one machine, our mail server. The
   mail spool is then NFS mounted by the clients.

   Playing with our newly installed mh 6.7, I discovered that if I do
   a inc on a machine which is NFS mounting the mail spool, then I can
   loose mail...

in your mtstailor file, add the lockstyle option 1 to do the locking
like SunOS expects:

lockstyle:      1

and you shouldn't lose any mail, provided the machines have a
consistent view of the spool file. (see below)

   If you are using standard unix mail, you have the risk of not
   seeing the mail (as the server and the client disagree for a while

upgrade to SunOS 4.1 (now you can even get 4.1.1) which has an option
to make the timeout instant just for this type of thing.  this way,
all machines have a consistent view of the spool files.

hope this helps.

								v.
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Vick Khera     Gradual Student          Department of Computer Science
ARPA:   khera@cs.duke.edu               Duke University
UUCP:   ...!mcnc!duke!khera             Durham, NC 27706       (919) 660-6528