Jeffrey Hutzelman wrote:
I very much recommend against trying to store mail in AFS. There is no gain to be had in reliability, scalability, or performance, and there are any number of potential problems. If what you're trying to accomplish is to get those features in a distributed mail server system, I suggest looking at http://asg.web.cmu.edu/cyrus/
I too am contemplating storing mail in AFS. Reading through the cyrus site, it seems to have it's own set of compromises. But regarding availability, the documentation of the Cyrus IMAP Aggregator, Secion 4.3 Summary of Benefits (http://asg.web.cmu.edu/cyrus/ag.html) seems to contradict what you're saying. It's "availability" simply guarantees that your whole mail system won't go down, not that at individual mailbox will always be availble. This seems to me to be pretty much the same guarantee that AFS provides by having a RW user volumes on a couple of different file servers.
I'm admittedly a novice with AFS and cyrus (currently using courier), but it seems to me like the best approach might be to tightly couple (same server or same LAN) a cyrus backend's mailboxes, the mail delivery (LTMP) and the AFS volumes that make up the storage. Then you know that you won't have two IMAP servers fighting for the same directory, but you still have the apperence of a unified server the cyrus provides. You could also then have some other IMAP server take over for a failed IMAP server by some external means.
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