Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!sdd.hp.com!wuarchive!julius.cs.uiuc.edu!ux1.cso.uiuc.edu!mp.cs.niu.edu!rickert From: rickert@mp.cs.niu.edu (Neil Rickert) Newsgroups: comp.mail.sendmail Subject: Re: Problem: mail spool area and .forward on different machines Message-ID: <1990Nov6.191239.27200@mp.cs.niu.edu> Date: 6 Nov 90 19:12:39 GMT References: <926@iiasa.UUCP> <1990Nov1.102200@ap.co.umist.ac.uk> Organization: Northern Illinois University Lines: 28 In article michael@uni-paderborn.de (Michael Schmidt) writes: > >We have ONE mail directory mounted on all machines, we are using. We >do local delivery to make "mail user" work (although we encourage to >(...) >You have to ensure, that all mailers involved respect the same lock. >In our case it is the standard lock file "user.lock" in the >maildirectory. It is respected by all our mailers including mail, elm, >mh, GNU Emacs rmail, ... How reliable is this locking method? In particular what is the possibility of the following sequence: Machine 1 creates the file user.lock. Machine 2 tries checks and finds that user.lock doesn't exist, because NFS hasn't yet copied back the buffers. etc. I am just curious. I am not an NFS expert, but I have seen some behavior which at leasts makes me wonder. -- =*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*= Neil W. Rickert, Computer Science Northern Illinois Univ. DeKalb, IL 60115. +1-815-753-6940