We are having problems with locking in our mail spool directory.
The symptoms: binmail reports via syslog that it is waiting for a lock on
file /usr/spool/mail/USERID. Occasionally, it later reports that it is
overriding the lock. More often it does not. At least some of the times
when it does not report overriding the lock, the mail it is delivering is
dropped on the floor. Nothing arrives in the recipient's inbox, nothing is
bounced to the sender, and nothing comes to me as the postmaster.
Our setup: We are running Berkeley sendmail-8.8.7 under Digital Unix 4.0B
on a DEC 4000. The spool filesystem is an ADVFS on a raid array local to
the mail server. We have lots of Digital Unix and Solaris clients, and a
few HP-UX clients, all nfs mounting the mail spool directory. The
workstations have null sendmail clients, and forward all mail to our mail
server. We are using binmail for local mail delivery.
Before, we had tried keeping the mail spool on a Network Appliance (a really
nice nfs server), but had problems with locking there, too. The problems
took the form of stale nfs file handles, and I had hoped that moving to a
local filesystem would solve our problems. At least it made the nfs erors
go away. ;-) However, when we had stale nfs file handles, the email
bounced. Now it just disappears.
Thanks in advance for any assistance you can give.
David Ritch
Received on Sun Mar 08 1998 - 05:58:19 NZDT