Setting up mailbox storage via NFS
 

Hi guys,

I want to set up a temporary storage area for an old server with too many mailboxes on another server, so that it won't run out of space again and again until I can replace the server alltogether.

The problem is that we have about 2000+ mailboxes now, and that old piece of ancient metal has about 10GB or space for the whole thing. We keep running out of space every other day. Because of some stupid internal company politics (the company is a sub-company of our group but their functions are being adopted by us for reasons and in ways both too booring and offtopic to get into right now)... The old sysadmin has already left and I'm not permitted to _replace_ the machine physically or logically until the procedure of transferrance is over. So I need to find a way to extend storage capacity instead without physically touching it or having it altered, or so to say...

This is what I had in mind (please feel free to comment if this is not how it's done - it's just what I came up with):

- We have an old, FC3 box and a new FC7 box, which will serve as a net storage server until one day it will take over the place of the FC3 box.
- For some creepy reasons I'm not _permitted_ to redirect traffic from the old server, but I'm permitted to utilize "extra storage in any form to solve the issue", so for this reason:
- I mount up the new server (in the same localnet as the old server) with NFS
- Copy over all mailboxes
- Make a symlink of the NFS mountpoint to /var/spool/mail
- Start mail apps (sendmail and dovecot) again

As far as I know, this should work, except that I'm not sure about fnctl locking to work over NFS. Maybe I should use dotlock? But I don't know how to set that up in sendmail or in dovecot.

Can you help me with some directions (config file is where, what to set, etc to achieve dotlock locking in the new mailbox dir)?

L.