Xref: utzoo comp.protocols.nfs:389 comp.mail.sendmail:982
Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cwjcc!gatech!utkcs2!moore
From: moore@utkcs2.cs.utk.edu (Keith Moore)
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.nfs,comp.mail.sendmail
Subject: How do I recover from NFS hangups from within sendmail?
Message-ID: <1072@utkcs2.cs.utk.edu>
Date: 10 Sep 89 09:00:41 GMT
Reply-To: moore@utkcs2.cs.utk.edu ()
Followup-To: comp.protocols.nfs
Organization: CS Dept, University of TN, Knoxville
Lines: 33


Briefly, here's the problem:

We have all of our UNIX systems organized so that they appear to share a 
common filesystem via NFS mounts.  Users' home directories are on their
own machines if possible in order to minimize net traffic and load on the
file servers.  Other users have home directories spread across four servers.
We also share a single /var/spool/mail directory among all of these machines.
Each of the sendmails is set up to forward local mail to the "mail server" 
system.  All of this works fine as long as all of the systems are up.  But
if any of the systems containing someone's home directory goes down, and 
someone tries to send mail to that user, the sendmail hangs up trying to
open that user's .forward file.  What I'd like to do is to modify sendmail's
forwarding code to check for the case that the user's .forward file is 
temporarily unavailable, and to mark mail for that user as being temporarily 
undeliverable.  Is there any way to do this?  Shouldn't there be?

This weekend our mail server's sendmail shut down because of the failure
of a single machine owned by a user who gets a lot of mail. 

It's beginning to look as if kernel mods are the cleanest way out...

Our mail server's sendmail is running 5.61+IDA patches and Ultrix 3.0.

Keith Moore			Internet: moore@cs.utk.edu
University of Tenn. CS Dept.	BITNET: moore@utkvx
107 Ayres Hall, UT Campus	UT Decnet: utkcs2::moore
Knoxville Tennessee 37996-1301	Telephone: +1 615 974 0822
-- 
Keith Moore			Internet: moore@utkcs2.cs.utk.edu
University of Tenn. CS Dept.	BITNET: moore@utkvx
107 Ayres Hall, UT Campus	UT Decnet: utkcs2::moore
Knoxville Tennessee 37996-1301	Telephone: +1 615 974 0822