River Tarnell river.tarnell@wikimedia.de wrote:
Hi,
During the next maintenance window (March 7th), we will make some changes to how mail forwarding works. This will not affect most users, but you should read this mail anyway, especially if you make use of .forward files. A summary of the changes you might need to make are at the end of this mail.
At present, all mail to user@toolserver.org is sent to your LDAP alias; if you don't have an address set in LDAP, mail is sent to nightshade and
- If you do not have an LDAP email address set, and you do not have a .forward file, then currently your mail will be delivered locally on nightshade. After the maintenance, your mail will be delivered locally on either hawthorn or clematis. We do not support this configuration, and you should set an email address in LDAP so your mail is forwarded. However, if you insist on having mail delivered locally, you can continue to do so.
I use toolserver email only for short-lived reports from cron or other jobs and nothing that I need to store longer or have a record of communications.
I am currently having "MYPRIMARYEMAILADDRESSOUTSIDE,\saper" in my $HOME/.forward which gives me a nice capability to use mail(1) or mailx(1) to quickly read whatever my jobs running on the localhost do. I do not mind *not* having this replicated accross the cluster, so a process running on willow sends mail to willow etc.
I do not have any LDAP entry related to mail (and it's fine, too).
Will local delivery on the Solaris boxes still possible?
The explanation of these changes is more complicated than the actual changes. The result should be that mail processing is much simpler and more obvious to users.
I understand that all hosts will start processing LDAP entries first, and forwarding the rest to the two hosts you named. However, currently local mail on clematis/hawthorn isn't replicated (i.e. when I delete a mailbox on one of them, everything stays there on the other, so I have to delete on both).
From the point of redundancy, I'd rather have local mail delivered where
it originated, since that host is most possibly up. I personally don't care much about mail originated externally (preferably I'd like to have one local mailbox to clean up).
SGE is smart enough to send email to the local account on the host where job started, which is very good to me, but seems not work on willow for some reason (filed https://jira.toolserver.org/browse/TS-955 with details).
Will local, per-host mail (from mail(1) or SGE) be preserved?
//Marcin