This also begs the question: if there is only a single NFS client,
with no access to the data by other NFS clients (or by processes on
the NFS server), then what purpose is served by having NFS in the loop
at all? The IMAP server is going over a network to have another
computer read from its disk and deliver the bits to the IMAP server;
why not have the IMAP server read the bits from a directly-connected
disk?
The purported advantages of NFS monoliths are the various redundancy
features that the monolith vendors have added to the product; those
features are not part of NFS itself. There is no technical reason why
an IMAP server, with local disk, can not be built to have the same
level of data redundancy.
If you worry about the IMAP server crashing; why do you believe that
an IMAP server is more likely to crash than an NFS server?
True, but the bigger picture is that in our environment there are many
other uses for the user's home directory besides email. So, I don't foresee
NFS going away anytime soon. One option might be to patch c-client such
that the mix folders can use something like /var/mix/username/INBOX/
instead of ~/INBOX/ . That way the mix folders would be local without
having to worry about creating a separate secondary set of local/non-NFS
home directories for all of the users just for use on the email server.
Best
might be to assume /var/mix is owned by root with the sticky bit set such
that if /var/mix/username doesn't exist, it gets created/owned by the user,
similar to how /var/spool works on some systems.
Another option would be to move imapd to the NFS server itself, but
in my opinion that's worse than moving the mail folders over to what's
currently the single NFS client serving email applications. It would
raise the question of sendmail, the local delivery agent, spam filtering,
virus filtering, and DNS MX records. Which ones would move or be
duplicated on the NFS server and which ones would stay on the NFS
client. Optimally I'd rather keep the NFS server handling users' home
directories and the email server handling email.
Thanks,
Brian
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