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Subject: Re: mail deliveries to NFS mount (sort of)
From: Adam Levin (alevinaudible.com)
Date: Tue Jun 13 2000 - 13:36:19 CDT

On Tue, 13 Jun 2000, Wietse Venema wrote:
> Adam Levin wrote:
> > On Tue, 13 Jun 2000, Wietse Venema wrote:
> > > Matthias Andree wrote:
> > > > The difficulty is that I'm currently unaware of the Postfix .forward or
> > > > .procmailrc status. Does Postfix stat() the user's homedir for .forward
> > > > or is Postfix assuming that the user has no .forward if the mount is
> > > > broken? qmail stat()s the homedir to see if it should defer the mail or
> > > > if the user has no .forward.
> > > I do not understand the question. How can stat() of a .forward file
> > > complete when its NFS file system can't be mounted?
> > I think Matthias was saying that he doesn't know how postfix checks for
> > the existence of a .forward file (postfix obviously doesn't care about
> > .procmailrc, and doesn't need to know anything about it). If postfix
> > tries to stat() the .forward, and it isn't there because the NFS mount is
> > gone, then bad things happen.
> I repeat.
> 1 - How can stat() of a .forward file complete when its NFS file
> system can't be mounted?

It can't. That's what my last sentence says, or at least implies.

> 2 - Are you perhaps using soft mounts? That's safe only for dumb
> stuff like man pages. It's a bad idea for home directories or
> mailboxes.

Personally, I only use soft mounts for read-only shares of log files that
people want to be able to see on other machines, but I'm even cutting down
on those. Homedirs are hard mounted, for the reasons you state, and it's
obvious that my fears regarding NFS mounting home directories from
somewhere else to my mail machine were justified, which is what I set out
to discover.

-Adam

Adam Levin, Senior Unix Systems Administrator | http://www.audible.com/
Audible, Inc. "There's a door."
Wayne, NJ, 07470 "Where does it go?"
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