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Re: "mailbox as soft link" problem

2008-07-09 09:49:44
At 14:45 2008-07-09 +0200, Markus Krause wrote:
We have to distribute the mailbox files of our (about 1200) users on our mailserver to different hard discs. So we tried to set up soft links for each user like

    /var/spool/mail/a_user001 -> /var/lv01/a/a_user001
    /var/spool/mail/b_user123 -> /var/lv02/b/b_user123
    /var/spool/mail/x_user234 -> /var/lv04/x/x_user234

But now procmail thinks that these are bogus files, renames them to something like BOGUS.a_user001.bg and creates a new INBOX file /var/spool/mail/a_user001 which of course breaks our effort of distributing the mailbox files on different disks.

Procmail does this if the file isn't owned by the correct user, isn't a file or a directory, etc. It is based on the 'paranoid' code setting, and there's only ONE place paranoid is set true (sometimes), and that's in screenmailbox, where the following comment immediately preceeds the call which eventually does the file tweak:

  *       check if the default-mailbox-lockfile is owned by the
  *       recipient, if not, mark it for further investigation, it
  *       might need to be removed


Out of curiosity, who owns the links?


From a system administration standpoint, more typically, one would establish the entire /var/spool/mail (or /var/mail/) directory as a mountpoint, or symlink the DIRECTORY to a mountpoint.

If you have a disk size issue, then the easy "real" - and fully transparent - solution would involve using RAID to make up a single very large volume from multiple disks and mount that as your mail spool.

Have you looked at the aufs union filesystem? Is it supported by the distro you're using? (none of this is a matter for procmail though).

        <http://aufs.sourceforge.net/>


---
 Sean B. Straw / Professional Software Engineering

 Procmail disclaimer: <http://www.professional.org/procmail/disclaimer.html>
 Please DO NOT carbon me on list replies.  I'll get my copy from the list.

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