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Subsections
We have described the benefits of delivering mail to users' home
directories, the traditional ways to do that and why we think they are
inadequate, and the design, implementation, performance, and convenience of
our alternative.
The main contribution of our work is the idea mail can be reliably delivered
to user's home directories for easy access with very little overhead, user
hassle, or the need for extensive intervention on the part of SAs.
A working prototype version of hlfsd was written in one weekend. However,
the ideas represented in the work span several years of experience in
network programming (especially RPC), NFS, amd, and mail systems.
It would be possible to integrate some of hlfsd's functionality into
amd, by providing special keywords like ${home}, ${user}
and ${group} for use in amd's maps.
We plan on making sure hlfsd is as portable as amd is, and improving
its performance as much as possible. An RPC interface for querying hlfsd's
status is needed as well.
Hlfsd's primary use is that of a mail-spool redirector. However, it can
be used to perform other tasks. All it takes are the right command-line
options:
- Hlfsd can manage the /var/tmp directory. Thus every user who
uses /var/tmp would actually be using a subdirectory within their own
home directory, rather than taking from system-wide resources.
- Other types of user-specific files which get spooled to a particular
host, such as Secret Mail[24] or electronic faxes can
also be redirected for spooling into home directories.
Next: 8 Acknowledgments
Up: HLFSD: Delivering Email to
Previous: 6 Related Work
Erez Zadok
12/6/1997