Thanks Sandy. Pre-loading the domain related settings might actually make sense for us.
What we are doing is moving to an external data source as we prepare to add additional Imail machines to share the load, because our current server will be maxed out very soon. We prefer the idea load balancing multiple servers instead of Imail's built in "peering" for large systems, because this has the additional benefit of adding redundancy. It sounds like you've probably set something like this up before, so if you have any other recommendations I'm all ears. We chose LDAP because it is optimized for high-read/low-write queries...whereas SQL is the opposite. We're using IBM's LDAP server. So basically our setup will be X load balanced Imail servers which will share the pop, imap, smtp connections. The Imail servers will each have their own spool folder, but will access the same LDAP userbase, and will access the same directory structure for all the domains' mail folders. We add several new domains per-day which is why we are looking into storing the domain related information in LDAP also...to keep the machines in synch. But pre-loading the data into registry at service startup might work out alright. We also have a SOAP interface we wrote for our billing/admin software to talk to Imail so we can just use that to add new domains to each Imail server on-the-fly as domains are added after the service has started. I know there are huge benefits in using the registry database, but once a system grows to multiple servers, I don't see that being feasible anymore. Would you agree? Bill -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of Sanford Whiteman Sent: Wednesday, January 01, 2003 1:52 PM To: Bill B. Subject: Re[2]: [IMail Forum] Problems changing external databases > What we really need is a function like 'SetDomain' where we can > rewrite the storing of the information from the registry to LDAP. As someone who has written several custom userbase DLLs, including an LDAP interface, I can assure you that you DO NOT want to store any more data in LDAP than is actually necessary. LDAP is not a configuration management protocol and is ill-suited to the query frequency and traffic volume of a userbase-only implementation--let alone trying to add hostbase information to the mix. If performance is of any importance at all, you will find yourself wanting to reduce and/or short-circuit your LDAP queries, not add *more* overhead. You are correct, of course, that IMail uses Registry hostbase data as the "anchor" for userbase DLLs, regardless of where userbase data is stored. While flexibility there might be nice, the design is quite sensible, given the read-mostly nature of hostbase data and the tremendous read volume on that data. The only practical way to create an LDAP "master" for hostbase data is to overwrite the Registry settings from LDAP just once, at service start, then do not touch that LDAP area again. Believe me, as you see the performance issues we wrangle with constantly--the cause, I should mention, for my constant reminders that the Registry database is hundreds of times more efficient than most external interfaces--you'll reconsider this part of your design. -Sandy To Unsubscribe: http://www.ipswitch.com/support/mailing-lists.html List Archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/imail_forum%40list.ipswitch.com/ Knowledge Base/FAQ: http://www.ipswitch.com/support/IMail/ To Unsubscribe: http://www.ipswitch.com/support/mailing-lists.html List Archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/imail_forum%40list.ipswitch.com/ Knowledge Base/FAQ: http://www.ipswitch.com/support/IMail/
