On Tue, 29 Feb 2000, William Ahern wrote:
> 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... ;)
This isn't quite the correct forum for this discussion, try some of the
newsgroups/mailing lists for specific MTA(sendmail, qmail, postfix, exim, etc)
and MRA(qpopper, wu-imap, cyrus-imap, etc.) programs and ask your questions
there.
Most of the newsgroups/lists I've been reading (sendmail, qpopper, postfix,
cyrus-imap) have always said that using NFS is a no-no because of the file
locking. I've read Weitse (creator and maintainer of postfix) comment on that
Linux NFS(I presume both user and kernel) has buggy file locking so it may be
just a case of these developer groups not recommending NFS in general because
of problems with specific OS implementations. Post your question/comment and see
what response you get (you might want to dig a little first to see what threads
have already been discussed). I know that some are using NFS but with maildir
type modfications or custom delivery program that tackle this issue, along with
the issues of having distributed MRAs.
Fairly recently a guy on comp.mail.imap posted a link to a paper about on how
Earthlink implemented their system.
http://www.earthlink.net/about/papers/mailarch.html
I'd like to find out more about this but just haven't had the time - nor am I
in charge of our company's mail server any longer so I've lost some of my
incentive as well.
--
Lars Nordin
Noble Systems Corporation
