hewitt@cs.unc.edu (W. Joe Hewitt) (08/17/88)
I am posting this to these newsgroups because this is where I posted my original request for information. I'm also adding the the appletalk newsgroup because there have been some requests for information on the subject. I hope this doesn't upset anyone. Due to the number of requests for information about using POP to transfer mail to and from the Macintoshes, I decided to write this summary. Our situation is that we have numerous UN*X machines (~ 150) running 4.3 bsd sendmail. We also have close to 100 Macintoshes on PhoneNET linked to our ethernet with a Kinetics box. What we were looking for was something that would let our Mac users send and receive mail without keeping an idle telnet session open all day. The package which we tried is SU-Mac/IP. It has a telnet and ftp program which is pretty nice. The other half is a mail handler for the Mac. Before I get any further, I would like to clear up some misconceptions. As I have been told, there are THREE different versions of POP protocols. There is the old POP, revised POP, and POP II. Stanford's package speaks revised POP. The POP daemon is included with MH. Sun's PC-NFS Lifeline product uses POP II. The source for the daemon is free (I believe). I don't know what uses old POP. Please correct me if I am wrong. Our first chore was to get the POP daemon up and running. The source for the daemon is contained in the latest release of MH (which I ftp'ed from somewhere). After oodles and oodles of loader/linker/compiler errors which needed reconfiguring, I got a /usr/etc/popd which would run. Problem number one -- When started the daemon would not release the csh prompt. Answer number one -- the daemon runs in test mode if it was called from a shell and in daemon mode if called from cron. The second problem was -- I kept getting a 'popd: Directory stack empty.' error when I tried to execute popd after it had been installed. Answer number two -- popd is a csh command. I have to fully qualify the name to get it to run. This one was real tough to find. But finally, we did get a popd up and running. The second chore was to configure the IP and mail programs for our setup. To make a long story short, the Stanford program was dynamically allocating IP address even though we selected the static option. I had numerous calls into the author, Andy Maas of Stanford, and he fixed the problem and mailed us a new version of both the telnet/ftp program and the mail handler. Many thanks to him for helping us out. Once that was completed, we fired it up and it runs great (but not perfect). There are a few features which still need work, but all in all the package is running like a dream. We have not yet put it into wide spread use, but plan to do so in the next few weeks. I hope this answers many of those questions on the subject. I will be more than happy to answer any further questions if I can. Thanks to all of you in net.land who helped me to get this thing working. _ _ _ _ _ ) ( / \ ) ) _/__/_ W. Joe Hewitt \ ^ / _/__/___ _ /__ / _ _ _ o / / postmaster \_/ \_/ o (_/ (__)__(/__ / / (/__(_/\_)_(_(__(__ hewitt@cs.unc.edu