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Subject: Re: mail deliveries to NFS mount (sort of)
From: Matthias Andree (madt.e-technik.uni-dortmund.de)
Date: Thu Jun 15 2000 - 19:45:16 CDT

Leif Nixon <nixonlysator.liu.se> writes:

> Matthias Andree <madt.e-technik.uni-dortmund.de> writes:
>
> > Yup. Clear text: Although the user *HAS* a .forward, stat() fails
> > (because of a missing NFS mount), Postfix assumes the user has no
> > .forward.
>
> Wouldn't this be the case only if the home directory has accidentally
> been unmounted?

Which happens deliberately a couple of minutes after the last use of
that home directory if you use autofs or automount (whatever your system
calls it).

> As long as the directory hasn't been unmounted, wouldn't stat() just
> hang, even if the directory is temporarily unavailable because the NFS
> server has blown up? Assuming you don't soft mount your home
> directories, of course, but *that* would be a bad idea.

True.

> > My setup is not sensitive to this problem, since Postfix has all
> > .forward and .procmailrc files ready, and if the /home/anybody NFS mount
> > is missing and the user has mail filtered to his missing home, it ends
> > up in the default spool.
>
> So what happens if you accidentally unmount the local home directories?

I cannot unmount local home directories, they're symlinks.

Nothing besides the normal will happen unless the user requests delivery
of some things to his $HOME, in which case the delivery will fail and
procmail will finally end up delivering mail in the default spool,
/var/spool/mail/$LOGNAME - which is a local file system to Postfix. And
that's the actual trick. No NFS, no headache.

(That NFS junk just brought three machines down again, another one was
taken down by that crappy vmnet stuff. However, mail is still working
properly.) 

-- 
Matthias Andree

                Where do you think you're going today?