Brian Richardson wrote: >> My question is: I am running KMail on my laptop. >> Currently I look for mail in /var/spool/mail . >> Is there any way I could look for mail on my desktop, >> ie on a remote machine, >> without running an IMAP server or something like that >> on the desktop? > > Short answer, yes. See below for more. > > [ snip ] > >> Is there some general programming technique (like named pipes) >> which would allow a remote address to appear to be local? > > There is a generally accepted protocol called NFS which allows remote > filesystems to appear as part of the local filesystem. I have used NFS > to mount /var/spool/mail to whatever machine I wanted to read mail on. > I think there is a configuration setting in KMail to allow it to use > mutt-style dotlocking which you will need to read mail from an NFS > mount. See exports(5) on the system which has your live mail spool. You > may also want to google for some general advice on setting up NFS on > your network. Thanks for that. I hadn't really thought of using NFS, but I'll look into it. I guess I am slightly reluctant to use NFS over WiFi, as I am not sure what will happen if the link breaks (as it does occasionally). Also I suppose I would have to ensure that NFS did not try to run if I was away from my desktop. My recollection is that NFS hangs for a very long time if it does not succeed? -- Timothy Murphy e-mail (<80k only): tim /at/ birdsnest.maths.tcd.ie tel: +353-86-2336090, +353-1-2842366 s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland
