AIX Mail stored in AFS space

[Russ Allbery]

R McGee <mcgee@us.ibm.com> writes:

> We currently are in production at AIX 4.3.3 and AFS 3.5.  We have our
> mail set up through a central mail server and NFS mount /var/spool/mail/
> from that server to every client machine.  Of course, anytime we have a
> problem with our mail server, EVERYONE feels it and grumbles loudly.  We
> would like to convert to a mail scheme where the mail is delivered and
> stored in the users AFS home directory and the need for a NFS mount is
> eliminated.

How much mail volume do you have?  This is okay for small sites, but if
you have any kind of reasonable mail volume, I think you'll find that the
performance of AFS for lots of small writes will kill you.

> I would be interested in hearing from anyone who has done this, with any
> associated problems, nuances, etc. and some direction on how to get it
> implemented.

We converted all of our mail servers to store mail on local disk and
provide POP access and then modified the Unix mail clients to retrieve the
mail via POP to the user's home directory when run.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>