Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!apple!mrspoc!starnet!mzellers
From: mzellers@starnet.uucp (Mark Zellers)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.sendmail
Subject: Re: Sendmail and NFS
Message-ID: <1990Dec15.203420.25181@starnet.uucp>
Date: 15 Dec 90 20:34:20 GMT
References: <1990Dec12.233139.6810@starnet.uucp> <4386@alliant.Alliant.COM>
Reply-To: mzellers@starnet.UUCP (Mark Zellers)
Distribution: na
Organization: Starnet Connections---Public Access UNIX
Lines: 41

In article <4386@alliant.Alliant.COM> rdr@cl4.alliant.com (Roger Roles) writes:
>
>I would be uncomfortable to have more than one machine
>writing into a mail spool directory.

I'll try your suggestion re: the OR flag.  If I don't have multiple
machines writing into a single spool directory, is there another way I
can acheive the same effect?  What I am trying to get is to have a
heterogeneous network act (for mail purposes) as if it were a single
machine.  Here are my objectives, in order of importance:

	* Users should be able to send mail within the local network
	without knowing which anything about which machine each user
	lives on.  Alias files seem to solve this nicely.

	* Notification:  Users should be informed as soon as possible
	after mail arrives for them even if they are not logged into
	their "home" machine.

	* Distributed access: Users should be able to read their mail
	from whatever machine they happen to be logged into, rather than
	having to log into their "home" machine to read mail.

	* Centralized administration:  Ideally, it should be possible to
	add users from a single machine.

It may be that Sendmail is not capable of providing the functionality I
want in a heterogeneous environment.  Still, I want to get as much of
this agenda implemented as possible.

One place I am fairly sure I can get to is notification without
distributed access.  It seems to me that if I export the /var/spool/mail
directory under a different name to each of the client machines, I can
get the mail notifiers on the client machines to tell the user that he
has mail on the central mail machine.  Then the user would just have to
log in to his home machine to pick up his mail.  I'd like to do better
if I could, though.

Mark H. Zellers
(415) 325-7175
decwrl.dec.com!voltaire!bwayne!mark