Jim McCloskey said: > > I'd like to ask your wise advice about setting up a Debian machine > as a web and mail server for a small university department. I > maintain a small network (6) of linux machines for the department. > Cheap hardware, mostly, but they've been wonderfully dependable.
i run several mailservers with cyrus and sendmail. cyrus is a very fast, very low resource IMAP/POP server. courier is good too but im not sure if the version in potato(debian 2.2) supports POP3 in a reliable fashion which is the main reason i went with cyrus a year ago. you can use postfix or exim or qmail inplace of sendmail if you like. apache is great as a webserver. a big mistake would be to use UW IPOP3D or IMAPD to serve mail. it drives load through the roof, and will reduce the life expectancy of your server by quite a bit. a quick test of opening an IMAP inbox with 5,000 messages in UW IMAP compared to CYRUS (or do it with pop3) will make it painfully clear. my smallest server is a p2-200 64MB with a 6GB and an 8GB drive, it serves about 10 people tops, load is nil, been running for about 230 days..only reason i don't upgrade the disks and ram is i dont want to break the uptime :) nate
