Home Link File System Daemon (hlfsd)

Hlfsd uses many of the same techniques (and source code!) as amd in order to create the illusion that a file in a user's home directory (/homes/someuser/.mailspool/someuser) is actually the system mailbox (typically,/var/spool/mail/someuser, /usr/mail/someuser, or the like) for that user.

Since amd and NFS already make home directories universally available, the addition of hlfsd means that a user's mail will always be there, and also that user mail can not fill system disks since it gets put in home directories. Probably its greatest benefit is that it eliminates the need to make a central mail host's mail spool available via NFS. This is the only alternative to hlfsd (other than making people log in to a designated mail machine to read mail), but it suffers from an amazingly annoying feature--if the mail spool is unavailable, client machines will hang (seemingly forever) waiting to access it.

In addition to the above, hlfsd does the right thing so that biff and similar programs work, so that lock files which applications want to place directly in /var/spool/mail can be created, and so on.

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