On Wed, 22 Aug 2001, Omar Thameen wrote:
Say we're working on some modifications to our mailing list management
system, and we'd like to find out if the modifications will hold up
when used on lists with a large number of subscribers. Is there any
way to send a test message to thousands of subscribers (or more),
who would typically be distributed over hundreds of SMTP servers?
This can be done with two machines; more can make it more interesting
but it isn't necessary.
The machines should be on their own network, preferably disjoint from
everything else. You may not want to risk "confusing" anything else.
Setup your application on one machine with a DNS server that is primary
for all kinds of domains, which you can even make up. Every host in
every domain has the same address: the other machine.
On your application machine setup all the lists you want with all the
subscribers you want in the various domains you have just setup.
Setup the other machine to be a receiver of all the domains you've just
setup and alias all the subscribers you just created to /dev/null (or
even keep a few just for testing). You may want to setup the receiving
SMTP to have a random delay before it closes the connection to better
simulate network conditions.
Start her up and watch the sparks fly! :-)
I do this all the time; works great.
Jim
PS. You say you're trying to test SMTP usage over various networks but
I'm not sure what that means. Your application machine is only going to
have one physical connection to the Internet right?
The above will test your list application and your machines ability to
handle the delivery of lots of messages. If you're looking to test your
SMTP implementation then you can get creative on the receiving machine.
It's not hard to setup a partition with "over quota" accounts, or a
virtual domain for wich all the users are invalid, or whatever else you
want to test.
--
James M. Galvin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
