On Tue, 29 Feb 2000, you wrote:
> > 2) Worst case scenario is that our public facing linux box gets hacked, and
> > taken down completely - what's the best way of backing this up to ensure
> > minimum downtime - we'd ideally like to have a 'backup' linux box that
> > mirrors itself from the main one, and will allow us to switch to it in the
> > case of the main box going down.. is this possible? What are the implications?
I'm new to NFS, but I have always entertianed the idea of keeping mailboxes on
NFS, then using round-robin DNS to keep several smtp and pop/imap servers
available, though I'd like to hear what people have to say about locking
issues. A friend and I suggested this to a Solaris team administering a medium
sized university mail-server. They declined, and instead seem content shutting
down a huge Sun server every week or so to add memory and disk space.
This way, you can offer very scalable and redundant mail services
(pop/imap/smtp) and have the shared disk space on a dedicated machine(s) that
can have robust disk services. Actually, you can probably do this quite easily
w/ 2 machines to start. One machine that the clients access and which really
only needs a moderate cpu and decent memory. The 2nd can be a tower w/ a nice
RAID card doing various levels of RAID on some reliable hot-swappable IBM
disks. A few grand, or less maybe, could easily get you off of the ground
running and ready for what comes your way.... 24/7 and room for growth on
commodity hardware... ;)
--
William Ahern
MIS, JINSA
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