[OpenAFS] mail spool on AFS

[Derek Atkins]

"Enesha Fairluck" <enesha@sunflower.org> writes:

> Forcing imap at this time is not an option.  We are in an ISP environment
> and users are barely able to comprehend and use their pop3, and out webmail
> solution for their mail.  We also have our servers seperated in as much as

Fine, then force them to use pop3 and webmail...  Just make sure
ALL user applications use _SOME_ mail access protocol and not
/var/spool/mail directly.

I don't see what's so hard about providing pop/imap accounts.  If you
can provide pop3, you can provide imap.  They are, essentially,
equivalent (at least in terms of how they use /var/spool/mail).  The
key point is that you have to keep users from accessing
/var/spool/mail directly.

Any solution with a distributed /var/spool/mail just will not scale.

> we have one that does the virus scanning, which saves to a directory, and
> another machine picks it up for delivery, and the webmail service is another
> one altogether, though it does in fact use imap for it's access.  Currently
> we are using NFS to make this, and several other directories, constantly
> available.  We are having, what I can only hope, are some file locking
> issues centered around the NFS and had hoped that AFS would solve our
> problems in this respect, and allow us to move to the next phase of our
> expansion.  Are there specific reasons that mail on AFS is a bad idea?  We
> didn't read of the mail on NFS problems until it was already too late to
> make a difference  Thanks again for your input

Unfortunately, as Russ pointed out, AFS will not help you in this issue.
File Locking in AFS is only advisory; it is not enforced.

For scaling, providing dedicated mail servers is really the way to go.

-derek

-- 
       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
       URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
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