[3344] in Release_7.7_team
Re: Athena Disconnected Operation White Paper Draft 2.
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Larry Stone)
Wed Jun 12 00:13:07 2002
Date: Wed, 12 Jun 2002 0:13:04 EDT
From: Larry Stone <lcs@MIT.EDU>
Reply-To: <lcs@MIT.EDU>
To: Jonathon Weiss <jweiss@MIT.EDU>
Cc: Bill Cattey <wdc@MIT.EDU>, source-developers@MIT.EDU, release-team@MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: Your message of Mon, 10 Jun 2002 21:08:13 -0400
Message-ID: <CMM.0.90.4.1023855184.lcs@defiant.mit.edu>
> lcs> Lockers are a good model because they define a chunk of (usually)
> lcs> network-accessible resource which can be handled by itself. Instead of
> lcs> thinking of which subtrees of /afs to mirror or cache locall, you can
> lcs> use the granularity of lockers.
>
> It's worth noting that it't not always worthwhile to bring eerythign
> local to the laptop. [...] Certainly there's also no
> need to bring the Solaris binaries local onto a linux laptop,
Quite true; I thought my original message mentioned this. The arch
subdirectory model would let us "localize" just the relevant
platform-dependent files.
This could be the default model for all lockers: By default, it could
sync just the arch/@sys, etc, man, share, and include subdirectories.
The sync process could look for exception directives both in the source
(e.g. a dotfile in the locker as in synctree) and the destination, so
both the locker owner and the end user could modify the behavior.
> lcs> We could modify named to check whether the machine is off the net, at
> lcs> which point it responds immediately with the canned "local map". This
> lcs> could implement some useful workarounds, e.g. establish localhost as an
> lcs> MX host for "outgoing.mit.edu", so that mailers would still be able to
> lcs> send to outgoing to relay their mail but in fact it would be queued
> lcs> locally.
>
> Your specific suggestion about making localhost an MX record won't
> work, since we don't run a sendmail listenter by default (one less
> network service to have holes). This doesn't matter for most
> applications, because they generally invoke sendmail directly to queue
> the mail. I guess netscape is the known exception, and I don't recall
> how evolution behaves. If all else fails I suppose we could look into
> starting an SMTP listener only on the localhost interface, but I don't
> know how easy that would be to set up.
I've done exactly this with Postfix for the credit-card app, because it
is a poor SMTP client and was timing out talking to outgoing. I'd be
happy to refine it for Athena if that would help. It listens to the SMTP
port only on localhost, and forwards to outgoing. Postfix also comes with
a "sendmail" emulation binary so MUAs that run /usr/lib/sendmail
can just run that.
-- Larry
