[939] in SIPB-AFS-requests
Re: mail aliases, project.*charon* volumes
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Calvin Clark)
Tue Jun 15 16:42:50 1993
Date: Tue, 15 Jun 1993 16:42:31 -0400
From: Calvin Clark <ckclark@mit.edu>
To: "Jonathan I. Kamens" <jik@gza.com>
Cc: ckclark@mit.edu, charon-maintainers@athena.mit.edu,
In-Reply-To: Your message of Tue, 15 Jun 93 16:00:54 -0400.
> Chill, Calvin.
I'm chilled now that I've had my piece.
> Tell me exactly what alias you tried to add. Send me a script of what
> you did after editing /etc/aliases, and the result. I will be glad to
> work with you to figure out what's going wrong and to improve the
> documentation in the README file so that others do not have similar
> problems in the future.
It's very odd, actually. I did this:
1) logged into charon as root and got tokens as myself in the sipb cell
2) put watchmaker in the path
3) cd'd to /afs/sipb/project/dec-charon/sendmail.cf
4) make clean
5) edited /etc/aliases, adding a line just like all the others,
namely:
vi-mtg:"|/usr/athena/bin/dsmail -d /usr/spool/discuss/vi"@charon.LOCAL
6) make
7) make install
8) newaliases
Now, the previous time I tried this, it gave me an error saying that I
couldn't alias non-local names. I checked /etc/localusers and the
/etc/aliases file for typos, weird non-printable characters, etc, and found
nothing wrong. I tried moving the alias line around and renaming the list,
just in case it's some dbm hashing lossage. No dice.
However, I did those 8 steps just now and it worked, so I don't know what was
wrong before.
> One possibility is that you're not putting the "@charon.LOCAL" at the
> end of the alias in the alias file. This is necessary even at the end
> of a pipe, e.g.,
>
> foo-mtg: "|/usr/athena/bin/dsmail ..."@charon.LOCAL
Not the problem.
> We've already had enough arguing about
> /afs/sipb/project/{,dec-,new-}charon. Everyone agrees that
> /afs/sipb/project/dec-charon should become /afs/sipb/project/charon
> after all data in the other two directories that is not replicated
> elsewhere is moved into it. No one has done it yet because no one has
> had time. I've done my part, I believe, by making sure that all of
> the stuff I maintain is in /afs/sipb/project/dec-charon rather than in
> either of the other two directories. I can't do much more than that
> -- I didn't put the files in the other directories and don't know
> what's safe to [re]move.
I think we should volunteer whoever decided that new-charon should point to
project.old-charon. If that doesn't win a prize for obscurity, I don't
know what does.
> As for /afs/sipb/project/charon-backup, that's a volume I created when
> trying to backup charon to disk when we were having disk problems last
> week. I deleted the mountpoint when the crisis was over, but forgot
> to release the project volume. I've now done that.
I realize that was a temporary measure because I was there. But
certainly the other volumes, which were bound to hang around for a
while, should have been announced on sipb-afsreq. I'm not blaming
anyone for this, because I vaguely remember that the previous charon
volumes were creating in a similar emergency situation.
> The ease/sendmail stuff isn't local to charon because NONE of the
> definitive sources for the stuff on charon is supposed to be local to
> it -- it's all supposed to be in /afs/sipb.mit.edu/project/dec-charon,
> so that it gets up (more) regularly and so that it's editable when not
> logged into charon. I thought most of the people actively doing work
> on charon were aware of this; I'm sorry if you were not.
Ok. I still think it would be nice to have a symlink or a README file
or something in /usr/local for each of the major services, just for
reference in case AFS is not available. I've made a symlink from
/usr/local/src -> /afs/sipb.mit.edu/project/new-charon for now, if only
for my own reference.
-Calvin
