Store and forward mailer

[Paul Collier <paul@biosun.tamu.edu>]

First, let me express my gratitude to the many good folks that
responded to my request for assistance in solving our mailer problem
on the Symbolics. Thanks to you, the problem is very nearly solved.

>From the responses I received, it is clear that a few sites have had
and are having similar problems, while most sites are functioning
correctly with no problems. So, I will summarize and post the final
fix, in the hope that someone may benefit from our mistakes. 

Finally, it is becoming clear that the problems with our mailer may be
linked to two things: the fact that we use a Class B Internet Address,
and our site configuration. I have heard from one site that uses a
configuration similar to ours, and that posting drew an immediate
critical response. In short, we (and perhaps others) do not use the
site configuration that Symbolics recommends. We have a namespace server on
one machine, our most powerful, our system file server on another, and
the user files on a third. This is due to disk space limitations, more
than anything else. We weren't willing to sacrifice paging space on
any of the machines in order to put everything on one. Consequently,
we need to set up 'forwarding hosts', as well as run the mailer on a
machine that does not hold the user files. As kludgy and inconvenient
as this sounds, it is unavoidable in our setup. We have experimented
with different configurations, and this one seems to work best in our
situation. I am interested in knowing if other sites have played with
this issue, what works best for them, and if any sites have managed to
find a configuration that strikes a (close to ideal) balance between
using the Symbolics computer as a server for other machines, and using
it as a development tool on its own. Obviously, other constraints are
involved, such as not loading a shared network with netbooting
traffic, security  (which doesn't work right, anyway), and the amount
of time that a staff member can spend on simple(!) site maintenance. 
Thanks again,


Paul Collier
Knowledge Based Systems Lab, Texas A&M