🚀 go-pugleaf

On Tue, 23 Apr 1996 11:46:36 GMT, Michael Doyle <miked> wrote:
>We run SUNOS and connect to Demon over 14.4 Modem.  In our office we use POP
>for the PCs and sendmail forthe other UNIX boxes.  What I'd like to know, is
>how Demon get the waiting mail to be sent to me after I attach?  Is it all in
>the /usr/spool/mqueue area and somehow my login causes a queue run to be
>forced?  How is that achieved when the login is on a router box?  The reason I
>want to know is I would like to connect a couple of home users (UNIX) to the
>system and I seem to have to run the sendmail queue really frequently to get
>anything working.  Surely Demon can't do this?

Exactly how Demon do this is proprietary, and I don't know the details.
Howver, the following has been gleaned over time:

i. They use MMDF, not sendmail. That way, it's easy to hack on the
individual program that carries out a given function, rather than the
spaghetti that forms sendmail (see ii).

ii. When a node connects, the MMDF delivery agent (known as deliver :-) )
runs, sending any queued mail for that specific node.

iii. The queue of mail for all connected machines is re-scanned at
regular intervals, so if new mail arrives or your SMTP listener wasn't
up when the first attempt was made, you get your mail.

So the answer to your question is "yes they do, well, sort of". With MMDF
it's easy to just attempt to deliver mail destined for a given address,
rather than scanning the entire queue, which, as you imply, would bring
the punts down even more heavily onto their knees than they appear to be
at the moment.

I'm sure all this is just a SMOP.....

Oh, BTW, their internal routing set-up/tear down on node
connect/disconnect is also homebrew proprietary as well AFAIK.
Or at least it was before the Ascends arrived. Things may have changed now.


-- 
Mike Pellatt, VCS Limited (A Knowledge Group company)
Tel: (+44) 117 9007500     Fax: (+44) 117 9007501     Mobile: (+44) 468 192021
Home Page: http://www.ktgroup.co.uk/~mike/