>I'd like to get some opinions as to the best way to configure a
>server for multiple domains.
>
>A client requested this and I'm trying to figure out the best way to
>implement it now, because in 2-3 weeks there could potentially be
>over 10 thousand users.
Not really that big compared to many Imail systems with 50K to over
150K users. But I bet you wanna do web mail 100% so that's another
ball game compared to 150K POP3 users.
>There are 6 domains that he would like the user to choose from when
>signing up. He only wants the user to have 1 account on the machine, period.
>
>I was thinking that the most effective way of doing this would be to
>create one host, and alias all the rest, so that no matter what they
>signed up as, all E-Mail addresses would work, however only 1
>mailbox would exist. (The user wouldn't explicitly be told that all
>domains work.....)
If 10K is all there will be, then this will work
technically. Understand that this means all 10K mailboxes will
necessarily be in just one directory tree. Not a fatal pb, but if
you're looking at 50 or 100K+ later, then you're asking for trouble
with that many directories under a single /maildomain branch on one
level and in one partition on one physical disk channel. Not a
forumula for scaleabilty.
The alternative would be to have 6 separate mailhosts and then check
for duplicate names at sign up time by having a utility query the
Imail registry for duplicates.
The advantage of 6 separate Imail hosts is that it allows the total
mailbox count to be spread over 6 directory trees, with smaller
counts at each /mailhost root AND eventually you can locate the 6
directory trees in separate partitions and even on separate disks.
This is scaleability.
>The machine is an Athlon 900 with 512MB's RAM, 30GB ATA/100 Hard
>drive (I-Mail has a 24GB compressed partition
2 scalelabilty mistakes there:
1) ATA is more CPU consuming and usually has tiny, if any, cache in
the disk channel and slows down with 2 ATA devices (disconnect your
cdrom drive), compared to SCSI, so SCSI, with 64 or 128 megs of
on-board cache is recommended.
2) Software compression by the OS is very expensive in MHz, and
uselessly, even stupidly, "economic" with the decreasing prices of
disk per megabyte. I see 30 mb ATA disks for under $200. What do you pay?
Also, you have no disk mirroring or striping, which is not prudent.
All disks mfr's have bad production lots and infant mortality
failures. You really need mirroring, preferably RAID 0 + 1 . Look
at www.3ware.com for hardware mirroring of ATA disks if you go ATA.
Also: http://www.acnc.com/04_01_0p1.html
Also: http://www.ultratech-llc.com for great NT / W2K compendium.
30 gb - 6 gb of non-mailbox storage = 24 gb for mailboxes
20 gb / 10K users = 2.4 mb / mailbox. That's not very much for a
webmail server since figure 20 Kb / msg gives 100 msgs / mailbox.
again, disk is cheap.
And you make a mistake with one Imail partition, so last comment on
disk usage: "parallelize" your disk i/o by spreading it over the
maximum number of partitions and disks available:
** System
** Dedicated swap partition, but better to have 1 gb of RAM to
minimize swapping
** Imail pgm + \spool (mail queue + log files, ie, absolutely
frantic, critical access requirements). Here you need to keep the
\spool directory as empty as possible. RTFM and KB for ispclean.exe
usage. rotate your daily log files out of the \spool directory with
AT or cron scheduled batch files.
** mailbox partition
> all for itself), Windows NT Server 4.0, Killerwebmail templates,
> EZSignup Utility.
ah, another HotMail/webmail wannabe? :))) Assuming you are going
to provide webmail-only mailbox access (or almost no POP3 access),
and knowing the ISP's expect 10% to 20% of their users to be
connected simultaneously (1000 to 2000 simultaneous Web mail
sessions, in your case, assume 24 x 365), I'd go ahead and put in 1
gb RAM, with the price of memory now lower.
Discourage your webmail users from sending attachments in webmail
since attachments have great potential to fail in webmail, causing
them and you no end of frustration and lost time.
If they want to send/receive attachments, tell them to do it in
POP3/SMTP AUTH access so the attachment processing is moved to the
user's mail client and out of the Imail web messaging service, which
is already going to be busy enough just with HTTP and CGI work and
scanning msg headers in mailboxes with 400 messages in them.
If you can afford another box (does not need to be huge and powerful
at all), look at IMGate in my sig to offload a ton of work from your
webmail/mailbox server, to protect it from mail bombs, relay
hijacking, spamming, address harvesting, etc. Be smart, set up IMGate
BEFORE that sh@t hits you, because it WILL hit you with that many
users. IMGate allows you to take your Imail box out DNS MX records.
Len
http://BIND8NT.MEIway.com : Binary for ISC BIND 8.2.3 T9B for NT4 & W2K
http://IMGate.MEIway.com : Build free, hi-perf, anti-spam mail gateways
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