procmail lockfile utility and NFS

Question

G'day,

Has anyone used the lockfile utility that ships with procmail in conjunction with NFS mounted directories?

The lockfile man page states that "Lockfile is NFS-resistant and eight-bit clean."

cheers, Rob

Answer 1

I've used it. My company had an very NFS-intensive infrastructure at one point (less so now) and many Perl sysadmin tools dating back to the mid 90s. We wrapped lockfile in a perl module so that we could do consistent locking across NFS mounts. For that matter, our home directories were NFS mounted and we used procmail to deliver mail into them using the same style of locking and never had any problems with it (procmail delivering mail via NFS from server-a and mail being read via firect file access or UW-imap from a bunch of other servers).

Answer 2

G'day,

Thanks for the response.

I had a dig through the lockfile source and saw that it uses lockf() which is "NFS- resistant" and not flock() which is not "NFS-resiltant".

Glad to hear from someone with good experiences "in the trenches"! (-:

cheers, Rob