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From: gnu@hoptoad.uucp (John Gilmore)
Newsgroups: net.mail
Subject: Re: Many machines one mail directory
Message-ID: <439@hoptoad.uucp>
Date: Sat, 25-Jan-86 20:50:30 EST
Article-I.D.: hoptoad.439
Posted: Sat Jan 25 20:50:30 1986
Date-Received: Sun, 26-Jan-86 17:19:19 EST
References: <5651@allegra.UUCP> <132@linus.UUCP> <977@psivax.UUCP>
Organization: Nebula Consultants in San Francisco
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Sid's mail solution is more robust, since if the other machine is
down, the "rsh" will just time out and drop mail, while if sendmail
is used to reroute the mail, it will queue it locally and retry every
hour or so.  Something similar should be done for "inews", like
spooling the message to a directory on the local machine (which is
remote-mounted by the central machine) and then doing an rsh to the
central machine asking that it be processed.  If the rsh fails,
a crontab entry can find it spooled and handle it later.

I'm not sure if "biff" will work if your mail is delivered on the other
machine, since it depends on getting a datagram from /bin/mail which
only goes to the local machine.

Note that centralizing /usr/spool/mail on one machine means that
when the machine goes down, no mail moves anywhere, and even old mail
is unreachable.
-- 
# I resisted cluttering my mail with signatures for years, but the mail relay
# situation has gotten to where people can't reach me without it.  Dammit!
# John Gilmore  {sun,ptsfa,lll-crg,nsc}!hoptoad!gnu    jgilmore@lll-crg.arpa