[TriLUG] Thanks and a request for more help.

[Rick DeNatale]

Thanks to the advice I got here I finally got RHL 9 installed on my
Cyrix processor box.

I'm a kind of adolescent Linux admin, trying to learn on my own. I'm
trying to move my fetchmail/spamasassin processing from my workstation
(frodo) to the Cyrix box which I dubbed clavin.
brick
I've set up NFS, NIS, and autofs so that I can log on to clavin with
accounts on the frodo. I've run into a conceptual wall trying to make
the mail spools work.  I'm keeping the mail spools on the workstation
for now and trying to get at them as a client on clavin

I first tied to automount by trying to duplicate the mounting of home
directories by adding:

* /var/spool/mail  /etc/auto.mail

to my /etc/auto.home

/etc/auto.mail has
* -rw,soft,intr frodo:/var/spool/mail/&

I restarted autofs, but when I tried to ls /var/spool/mail/rick when
logged in as either rick or root it couldn't find the directory. I'd
also tried mounting /var/mail the same way (it's a link to
/var/spool/mail) neither way worked.

So then I gave up on automounting and took the /var/spool/mail line out
of /etc/auto.home and put an nfs mount for frodo:/var/spool/mail into my
/etc/fstab

frodo:/var/spool/mail /var/spool/mail nfs
bg,intr,soft,wsize=8192,rsize=8192 0 0

(one line of course)
The first time I did this I goofed up and left out the nfs. Clavin
complained that the wsize and rsize options weren't supported, but
proceeded to mount the directory anyway.  I then went back to frodo, and
when I checked my e-mail in evolution, I found that I'd lost my old mail
spools, and only had new e-mails.  I've since put the nfs field in and I
THINK that things are working.

I've done a lot of looking and while I've found lots of books, and
googles pages which say that sharing mail spools is a common thing to do
with nfs (and implications that autofs should work) I can't find any
kind of how-to which actually goes through the steps.

So can anyone here point me to one?

I'd also like advice on how to actually do the migration of the
fetchmail/spamd processing to clavin. I'm trying to offload the spamd
processing since frodo sometimes gets unresponsive to me, and when I've
telneted in from a windoze machine and done a top, I find that spamd is
sometimes soaking up a lot of cycles. 

Right now, I'm running (all on frodo):

fetchmail to get mail from my isp - this is running as a crontab task
from root's cronfile, the procmailrc is set up to run the mail through
spamassassin via spamd.

I'm also running sendmail on frodo, this is processing locally sent
mail, and also serving incoming mail for this domail
(denhaven2.homeip.net). I set up this backchannel for e-mail since my
isp is overly aggressive in using dnsbls and blocking.

What I'm thinking about as a migration path is:
1) install spamassassin on clavin
2) remove fetchmail from the crontab on frodo
3) stop sendmail on frodo
4) stop spamd on frodo
5) somehow train the new spamassassin on clavin what spamassassin on
frodo had learned in its bayes database. I'm not sure how to do this.
6) start spamd on clavin
7) set up fetchmail on clavin and put it into the crontab there.
8) edit /etc/mail/spamassassin/spamassassin-spamc.rc on frodo to point
to clavin as the host for spamd
9) start sendmail on frodo

This will leave sendmail running on frodo and using the spamd on clavin.

Is this a workable plan? Does anyone know how to transer the "educated"
spam-assassin from one machine to another? Do I need to worry about
locking if fetchmail and sendmail both cause spamc to access spamd
concurrently?