rerouting mail after a timeout (Many machines one mail directory)

[Hal Schloss]

In article <132 at linus.UUCP> sid at linus.UUCP (Sid Stuart) writes:
>>Many users here do most of their work on Suns, using the central vaxes
>>only for reading mail and netnews.
>>
>>      Mark Plotnick
>>      allegra!mp
>
>
>       The nicest solution to this problem would be to have only one
>/usr/spool/mail directory across your network of computers.
>Having only one /usr/spool/mail directory means that whatever computer
>you log into, you read the same mail.  I don't think it would take more than
>a week or two of work to do, unfortunatly I haven't had a week or two to do it
>yet. I am hoping Sun will do it in Release 3.0. Here is the idea,
>
>                                               sid at linus


I did it. What I have done is to have two vaxes both appear as the same machine
for mail and netnews purposes. As sid suggests latter is his message the Mt.
Xinu NFS port is required to accomplish this. If you have this what you can do
is have all the machines use just one mail directory and one netnews directory.

For mail I set it up so that /usr/spool/mail is actually the same directory by
using a symbolic link on the new machine to point to the old machines directory.
This requires NFS. Thus to read the mail a user must only run mail on either
machine and things go fine. To send mail I force sendmail to run only on the
old machine. The new machine has the following script for sendmail.

#!/bin/sh
cat << EOF > /vax/tmp/rsh$USER$$
#!/bin/sh
PATH="$PATH"
export PATH
rm /tmp/rsh$USER$$
exec $0 $*
EOF
chmod u+x /vax/tmp/rsh$USER$$
exec rsh psivax /tmp/rsh$USER$$

This forces sendmail to run on psivax.

For the netnews, I have set up /usr/spool/news to be named identically on
both machines, and run inews only on one of the machines. I use a similar
script for inews.
--
                Hal Schloss
                (from the Software Lounge at) Pacesetter Systems Inc.
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