AIX 1.2 for PS/2, SendMail/NFS problems

[Peter Jeffe 512.823.4091]

In article <1012 at cameron.egr.duke.edu> amr at dukee.egr.duke.edu (Anthony M. Richardson) writes:
>I mount a particular directory on another machine over a user directory...
>Everything seems to work fine after that except for mail.  If I just 
>type "mail" the program hangs.

I think this must be due to file locking over NFS not being supported.
I don't have access to PS/2 code, but I can tell you how to get mail to
work on another directory, e.g. /usr/mail.

1) Set the MAIL and MAILBOX environment variables in /etc/profile (or
$HOME/.profile) to be "/usr/mail/$LOGNAME/.newmail".  (I think we can only
tell bellmail what directory to use, so we're stuck with <dir>/.newmail.)
The MAILBOX var tells mail where to look, and MAIL tells the shell (so it
can tell you when new mail arrives).

2) Create a directory under /usr/mail for each user (yech) and make it 775,
owner bin and group mail.

3) Modify sendmail.cf: find the Mlocal mailer definition, and change the A=
field from "-D$z" to "-D/usr/mail/$u".  This tells bellmail where to put the
mail.

4) Run "/usr/lib/sendmail -bz" and restart the daemon.

This should do it: bellmail will put mail in /usr/mail/<user>/.newmail and
mail will find it there (if you use MH or some other mail reader, it should
allow you to specify the mailbox location).  It's a kludge, but it works!
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Peter Jeffe   ...uunet!cs.utexas.edu!ibmchs!auschs!sandino.austin.ibm.com!jeffe
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