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From: dennis@Peanuts (Dennis Cottel)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apollo
Subject: Re: Apollo should use sendmail internally
Message-ID: <1455@nosc.NOSC.MIL>
Date: 30 Oct 89 16:16:55 GMT
References: <1547@novavax.UUCP> <4676c05b.20b6d@apollo.HP.COM>
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mishkin@apollo.HP.COM (Nathaniel Mishkin) writes:
> The reason is that there's a fundamental problem with the "standard"
> Unix mail model.  Basically, I don't want to have to address mail I send
> to internal users directly to the machine that user gets mail on.  I
> want to mail to "smith" not "smith@smiths-machine" or the like.  

> Various people have gotten around this problem in various ways:  (1)
> distribute aliases files to all machines (or use links and a distributed
> file system to link to one or more "central" copies), (2) arrange that
> all mail gets sent to a "smart" host which has an aliases file or the
> like and disposes of the mail properly, (3) pretend that your network
> is really one big timesharing system and use /bin/mail and trust that
> it will be able to write to a central /usr/spool/mail directory on some
> fileserver.

Does each node then have an /etc/spool/mail directory and a sendmail
daemon running?  Otherwise case (2) and (3) can't spool up the mail if
the central mail machine is down.  A similar problem occurs for case
(1) if you use links to find the alias file. [This is another good
example of why the operating system should provide some kind of
"redundant link".]

And this still doesn't address the problem with file locking across
nodes: touching your mail spool file from a node other than that where
the spool directory lives may break sendmail, causing the mail to be
returned to sender (or worse).

	Dennis Cottel  Naval Ocean Systems Center, San Diego, CA  92152
	(619) 553-1645      dennis@nosc.MIL      sdcsvax!noscvax!dennis