Agree with the below. We actually use Maildir, and have the spool on a RAID array, but multiple front ends mounting the same UFS filesystem with solaris is...well...not a good idea, to say the least. Rsync still has issues as it it not "atomic" from the view of the pop/imap application--has anyone actually tried to do this? I would imagine it could result in garbage email form time to time, if a user pops in the midst of rsync transferring that critical 30mb word.doc.
My intention in our env is to move the mail spool to the NetApp, have two boxes mounting the NetApp, behind a load balancer. This of course assumes you have a properly architeced mail system to begin with, and as we already have 3 public facing boxes behind the load blancer relaying mail into the pop/imap server, delivery is not impacted by this at all, you can simply have mail delivered primary to one pop/imap box, then secondary to the other. As for getting mail to remote sites--LDAP--use it to route mail to the appropriate server based on geography--details are an exercise for the reader. The problem with delivering to remote sites is 1) a 30 person office has the expertise to manage a mail server? 2) So you want me to manager 5 different hostnames to give to users to get their mail? That sounds like fun when your ticket's are effectively centrally managed in the US. The first part is going to happen, the second part would be nice according to some, more of a pain that it's worth for 4-600 employees according to others (myself included). -rob On Fri, 12 Apr 2002, Daniel Feenberg wrote: > > Wouldn't rsync do a better job with an MTA using "maildir" format for > message delivery? After all, given two alternative /var/mail/userid files > with different "last write" dates, what is rsync to do? I expect it will > update the older file to the newer file's content, but the older file > could have messages that the newer file did not, depending on what may > have failed when. For example, if the older file missed a delivery due to > downtime, but is now back up, or if the newer file is newer solely > because of a POPD write. A maildir directory, with one file per > message, might cause duplicate delivery, but nothing would get lost. > > Near-instant failover of mail delivery is probably a research topic, but > what about just putting /var/mail on an external RAID-1 box? If the > computer dies, move the box to a backup computer. (Ask the backup to > answer at the primary server's IP address while it is in service). That > is, If a disk dies, let RAID handle it, if a computer dies use another. > Not very costly, and it is a lot easier to move a disk from one computer > to another than it is to restore from backup. > --- Send mail for the `bblisa' mailing list to `[EMAIL PROTECTED]'. Mail administrative requests to `[EMAIL PROTECTED]'.
