oldam@MATH.LIU.SE (Olof Damberg) (04/08/91)
I am considering setting up AMDS here at our site, in order to be able to handle mail, bboards, netnews etc. in a consistent fashion. However, after having consulted the available documents in the Andrew distribution, and after having watched the traffic in the info-andrew newsgroup for quite a while, I have realized that this is not an easy task. The huge number of parameters which need to be set to get the delivery system up and running is a discouraging factor. I also find that if you are in an non-AFS environment, then the installation procedure is not as well defined as in an AFS environment. Furthermore, we do not have AFS specific programs such as 'mpp' and 'package', which are needed (?) to build and maintain the delivery system. The AMDS installation doc 'AMDS.ins' says that AMDS will also work in an non-AFS environment, so my question is: Is it possible to run AMDS in an NFS environment ? (I do not expect it to be at all trivial, but I hope it is manageable.) If there are sites out there running AMDS (perhaps with bboards and netnews etc.) in an NFS environment, I would be very grateful if they could share their experiences with me. Was it worth the trouble ? (I would surely appreciate anything from the smallest hint to copies of setup files, scripts etc. with the parameters used at your site.) Many thanks! ----- Olof Damberg | email: oldam@math.liu.se Dept of Math, Linkoping University | phone: +46 13 281473 S-581 83 Linkoping, SWEDEN | fax: +46 13 100746 Some site-info: A net of Sun4's (2 servers and ~40 diskless clients) running SUNOS 4.0.3 (soon 4.1.1) and NFS. ATK patchlevel 9. X11R4 patchlevel 18.
Craig_Everhart@TRANSARC.COM (04/09/91)
AMDS is a local mail delivery system. I doubt that you really want to run it unless you're also running AFS or something a lot like it. In particular, it's most useful within a single naming environment; you could run it on a single machine, or in any collection of machines that share files, where a given file has the same name everywhere. (This is the standard situation with AFS.) It sounds as though you simply want to run AMS, which is a collection of user agents and often a daemon that manages public folder trees. AMS user interfaces allow users to treat their personal mail and the public folders (local bboards, netnews, mailing lists) as variants of one another. The short version of how that works is like this: Every user gets to build a folder tree for their own mail. You can invent distinguished pseudo-users in the system whose folders are open for public read access, that are used as the local public bboards, and that are updated by daemons running as one or more of these pseudo-users (absorbing netnews and what-not). Hope this helps. Craig