Do you have a VMS Cluster with multiple Boot disks or Multiple CPU Architectures? Do your users seem to have problems with VMS Mail like not being notified when there is new mail, or mail not being received, or inaccurate new mail message counts? This is typically because you missed the section in VMS clusters concerning MAIL.The documentation clearly shows you how to unify things like the User Authorization, and the Rights List Database files, but the section on MAIL is stated in a later section which is commonly missed. Therefore, if you didn't read the entire manual on Clustering, you may have missed it.
This is because each boot disk has it's own MAIL system, even though a user can log into any node in the cluster. For example, if a user logs into a node that boots off boot disk "A", and send mail to another user who is logged onto a node that has booted off boot disk "B", then the receiving user's MAIL.MAI file is updated with a new message, but his mail system doesn't know about it.
Fixing the problem is as simple as defining a logical name. First choose one of your boot disks to be the home of your Mail system's SYSTEM profile. Typically, this is the same disk that you chose to hold your cluster wide User Authorization, the Rights list files, and the Network Proxy Databases.
If you have not unified your User Authorization, Rights list files and Net Proxy Databases, make sure that is done first by following the instructions in "Unifying a VMS Cluster with Multiple Boot Disks", before continuing with this set of instructions.
Assuming you have unified the other files, edit the file SYS$MANAGER:SYLOGICALS.COM on each of your boot disks. There you should have mounted the one boot disk which contains the master User Authorization and Rights list files. In this file there should be the logical name definitions :
$DEFINE/SYSTEM/EXEC/NOLOG QMAN$MASTER AXPVMSSYS:[VMS$COMMON.SYSEXE]
$DEFINE/SYSTEM/EXEC/NOLOG SYSUAF AXPVMSSYS:[VMS$COMMON.SYSEXE]SYSUAF.DAT
$DEFINE/SYSTEM/EXEC/NOLOG RIGHTSLIST AXPVMSSYS:[VMS$COMMON.SYSEXE]RIGHTSLIST.DAT
$DEFINE/SYSTEM/EXEC/NOLOG NETPROXY AXPVMSSYS:[VMS$COMMON.SYSEXE]NETPROXY.DAT
$DEFINE/SYSTEM/EXEC/NOLOG NET$PROXY AXPVMSSYS:[VMS$COMMON.SYSEXE]NET$PROXY.DATAs demonstrated in the VMS page "Unifying a VMS Cluster with Multiple Boot Disks". In the above examples the AXPVMSSYS is a logical name pointing to the one master boot disk. You may have another logical name on your system. Now add these two lines :
$DEFINE/SYSTEM/EXEC/NOLOG VMSMAIL_PROFILE- AXPVMSSYS:[VMS$COMMON.SYSEXE]VMSMAIL_PROFILE.DATA
$DEFINE/SYSTEM/EXEC/NOLOG MAIL$SYSTEM_FLAGS 7These lines should be added to the file SYS$MANAGER:SYLOGICALS.COM, one on each boot disk. However, on your master boot disk, the logical name for the system disk will be SYS$SYSDEVICE. The logical MAIL$SYSTEM_FLAGS logical name is set to 7 to enable all nodes to notify the appropriate users regardless of which node they are logged onto. Omission of this logical name will alert the user only if he/she is logged onto the node from which the mail message is sent.
Once you have made these changes to your SYLOGIN.COM files, you should reboot the entire cluster. Once the cluster is up, have each user log in, and activate mail in on a terminal or terminal window from the DCL prompt, to enter in the following MAIL command :
MAIL>READ/NEW
MAIL>EXITThis will synchronize the users mail files with the newly unified system mail profile database.
For more information concerning MAIL, see the section on MAIL files in "A Clean Directory is a Happy Directory".
If you have any questions or problems with the above procedure, please feel free to eMail me with the specifics of your problem or question.
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