Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!triceratops.cis.ohio-state.edu!karl From: karl@triceratops.cis.ohio-state.edu (Karl Kleinpaste) Newsgroups: comp.mail.sendmail Subject: Re: NFS mail Message-ID: Date: 3 Mar 89 20:01:49 GMT References: <17946@genrad.UUCP> Sender: news@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu Organization: OSU Lines: 21 In-reply-to: rob@genrad.com's message of 3 Mar 89 02:36:56 GMT rob@genrad.com (Robert S. Wood) writes: Can I do this with mail? Can I mount /usr/spool/mail everywhere and not transport it around? Can I trick mail to thinking it is coming from the 'main' machine irregardless of where it is coming from? Would I still use sendmail, or should /bin/mail be all I need with a special sendmail.cf on the 'main' machine? Has anyone done this? Am I off-track? We've been doing it for over 18 months. Works fine. I recommend, however, that you install a modified /bin/mail which [a] doesn't give up on open(2) failures, in case the mail-housing host goes down (we soft-mount) and [b] uses the old-style /usr/spool/mail/username.lock style of locking, since flock(2) doesn't work across NFS. I put together our /bin/mail from the Pyramid OSx and SunOS 4.0 versions. As for fooling the system into thinking that all mail comes from one host, the sendmail.cf I use believes that everyone is username@cis.ohio-state.edu - we hide hostnames entirely. You can't tell where it was written without peeking at the Received: headers. --Karl