On Wed, 8 Nov 2006, Dan Mahoney, System Admin wrote:
What about the case where the mail spool is in the user's home directory
(which may/may not) be mounted via NFS? Will dotlocking work for that?
None of the warnings about .lock files apply when the mailbox file is in
the user's home directory. If that is the case on your system then you
can disregard the entire issue.
There's a confusion of terminology here. The "spool directory" refers
exclusively to a shared directory in which all users' incoming mail is
placed and which the files are named after the user. Typical spool
directory names are
/var/mail
/var/spool/mail
/usr/mail
/usr/spool/mail
On such systems, user mrc's mailbox would be a file, such as
/var/spool/mail/mrc
that is owned by mrc. However, the spool directory (/var/spool/mail) is
not owned by mrc since it is shared by all users. If the spool directory
is protected 1777, then mrc can create /var/spool/mail/mrc.lock and all is
good; if not, then only by means of a privileged tool such as mlock can
mrc create the /var/spoo/mail/mrc.lock to do this.
Also, is there a primer as to all this somewhere?
There is some discussion of this in the locking.txt documentation file in
the IMAP toolkit. That file is quite old, but there's still a fair amount
of good information in it.
The general information on how .lock files work should be in any good UNIX
sysadmin primer, since it normally applies to all UNIX systems including
those which do not use UW IMAP in any way.
-- Mark --
http://staff.washington.edu/mrc
Science does not emerge from voting, party politics, or public debate.
Si vis pacem, para bellum.
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