Problem with /bin/bellmail on AIX 3.1

[Michael G. Beirne]

In article <1991Jan17.161907.13020 at turnkey.tcc.com> jackv at turnkey.TCC.COM (Jack F. Vogel) writes:
>In article <1790 at inews.intel.com> echan at scdt.intel.com (Eldon Chan ~ ) writes:
>
>[ mail directory is NFS mounted ]
>
>>It appeared to me that bellmail has problem writing
>>to a NFSed directory...
> 
>Yup, interesting since this is also the case with AIX 1.2, guess its a family
>sort of problem :-}. The problem, I believe, is that bellmail is suid root
>so we have the "feature" in NFS where root=nobody and therefore it can't
>write the file. At least this has been my assumption although I never have
>spent any time really tracking it down for certain.
>
>Seems like your solution of forwarding to the NFS host is the best alternative
>Anybody know what Sun themselves does about this or whether or not they have
>the same problem??

SunOS 4.0 and up sendmails check whether or not the /usr/spool/mail
partition is mounted and if it is, forward the mail to system it is mounted
from. I have modified the IBM sendmail.cf here to forward mail to a
system that can resolve any non local mail and itself receives all
the mail from the other RS6000 systems. There are also problems with
file locking if multiple sendmails or /bin/bellmails are trying to write
the same file at the same time. These are gotten around if the mail
is always forwarded to one system which installs the mail. The IBM
sendmail also will not send mail to any machine in the Austria country domain
.at due to the way they handle spaces in the configuration file. The 
.at gets changed into an @ which is will of course be unresolveable.


mikebe at i88.isc.com or beirne at limerick.chi.il.us
--
mikebe at i88.isc.com or beirne at chinet.chi.il.us