[OpenAFS] mail spool on AFS

[Nathan Rawling]

On 20 Nov 2001, Derek Atkins wrote:

> Nathan Rawling <nrawling@firedrake.net> writes:
> 
> > By adding LDAP, or another directory service in front of this system (ex,
> > X.500 similar to Umich) you can easily migrate users between servers as
> > well. It could be implemented using flat files and DNS only, but it would
> > probably be a real hassle to maintain.
> 
> MIT uses Hesiod, which is based on DNS.  The management is
> via a database that writes out the DNS file.  This way users
> can be migrated -- the mail apps look up the POServer in Hesiod
> to find out which Mail Server to contact.

How much code-modification was required to add this support to the
mailreaders? I believe that Hesiod was added into Pine a while back, but
I'm curious which other mailreaders would be ready to go.

I'll be honest Hesiod, scares me. It obviously works, but it just seems
like a lot to build on DNS. =)

Last time I looked at it (a year ago or more) Umich did it by breaking up
the userbase into 26 groups by the first letter of the username and
balancing those groups onto servers using DNS mappings. But if more
granular support were required, you could divvy up the userbase into more
groups based on some other hashing mechanism. I can see though that pretty
soon you end up architecting Hesiod all over again. However, unless you
have a gigantic user load, or really wimpy mailservers it might be
overkill.

Nathan