Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!wuarchive!julius.cs.uiuc.edu!psuvax1!rutgers!gatech!prism!gs26 From: gs26@prism.gatech.EDU (Glenn R. Stone) Newsgroups: comp.unix.admin Subject: Re: Network-wide Mail Spool? Message-ID: <16640@hydra.gatech.EDU> Date: 7 Nov 90 21:15:58 GMT References: Reply-To: glenns@eas.gatech.edu Organization: Dead Poets Society Lines: 46 In karl_kleinpaste@cis.ohio-state.edu writes: >fpb@ittc.wec.com writes: > Well lets see a fast scan if man pages and related things lists as items > which (on SunOS) specifically reference /var/spool/mail/ : >Any reason why one couldn't place symlinks: > cd /usr/spool/mail > foreach i (*) > mv $i ~{$i}/.newmail > ln -s ~{$i}/.newmail $i > end > chmod 555 /usr/spool/mail # to prevent removal of the links. >That's a serious question; I've been debating this for a while. We'd >like users' mail not to occupy space in a public filesystem, but >rather take up space under the area where quotas are enforced. This assumes quotas are in the kernel.... That's not so on quite a few machines.... Sequents, R/S 6000's, Sun folks who haven't upgraded.... On a Sun with 4.x, the symlink is a legit way to do things, especially since nasty things happen when /var fills up... but, on the other hand, it's not a good idea on a non-quota machine, since equally nasty things happen when users' home partitions fill up and they try to use a shell with history or some such..... (this assumes some bozo mailer is bombing your machine whilst you're abed asnooze, and others are trying to finish that project at 4am...) This also assumes that people aren't going to break things by chmodding .newmail to something funky, or that the mail delivery program runs setuid root (which it does on USG).... Something else to consider..... I have a cluster of machines, and my users (read: bosses) want to be able to get mail on whatever machine they log into..... any way you try to go about this, a symlink will get shot in the foot. In a nutshell, I think the call on whether to symlink or not is highly system-dependent, and therefore should be left up to the individual S/A..... who should only do so after careful study of the system config. and TFM (and p'raps the net at large.... which is exactly what's going on here). -- Glenn R. Stone glenns@eas.gatech.edu