mail delivery and lockd

[Francis Kam]

>From:    Philip Prindeville  <philipp at opus.cs.mcgill.ca>
>...Not being one to wait, can someone send me the diffs to patch /bin/mail
>and /usr/ucb/Mail to work with the lockd(8) stuff (F_WRLCK, etc)?

We have all our clients automount  one of our server's /var/spool/mail
onto their own /var/spool/mail, then specify in /etc/sendmail.cf that all
mails should be forwarded to that server host, regardless of incoming or
outgoing mail.  According to the man page of flock(2), fcntl(2v) and
lockf(3) both make use of lockd, except flock(2) itself.  I have
experienced reading mails while getting biff to notify me of new mail, and
quitting with deleted mails and so on wouldn't mess up my
/var/spool/mail/<user> file and my mbox file.  My users here have never
reported problems about mail messing up so far.

We have been running 4.0 since August and so far so good.  I don't see
noticeably difference of performance in the general sense, except sunview
starts up slower than before. There are quite a lot of nice things to us
though, like supporting different netmasks on different ie?s in ifconfig,
discarding nd and the use of nfs for clients, faster dump, reduced load
module due to dynamic library, etc. But some third party softwares might
not take this advantage, like kcl which has to be compiled with -Bstatic.
Oh, yeh, automount in 4.0 is very handy for file system migration and user
home directory relocation.  To be fair, I would argue 4.0 is pretty ok at
least at my site.

Francis Kam                           CSC-3475
Internet: mkkam at cs.uh.edu             Computer Science Department
          mkkam at sun1.cs.uh.edu        University of Houston
CSNET:    mkkam at houston.csnet         4800 Calhoun
Phone: (713)749-1748                  Houston, TX 77004.
       (713)749-4791