Hi!

On Mon, May 10, 2010 at 6:47 AM, spambox <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>
> On Mon, 10 May 2010 01:00:29 -0430
> Jose Ildefonso Camargo Tolosa <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>> Hi!
>>
>> Yes, I know, this is kinda off-topic, but looks interesting.
>
> Thank you for your interest!
>
>> > |-------------|
>> > |   postfix1  |               very big storage
>> > |   LDAP1     |-------------|********************
>> > |   server1   |             |                   *
>> > |-------------|             |   /home1          *
>> >       |                     |                   *
>> >       |                     |-------------------*
>> > |-------------|             |                   *
>> > |   postfix2  |             |                   *
>> > |   LDAP2     |-------------|   /home2          *
>> > |   server2   |             |                   *
>> > |-------------|             |                   *
>> >       |                     |-------------------*
>> >       |                     |                   *
>> > |-------------|             |   /home3          *
>> > |   postfix3  |             |                   *
>> > |   LDAP3     |-------------|********************
>> > |   server3   |
>> > |-------------|
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> >
>
>> Ok, so, load balancing here, with different homes for each server, so,
>> each server have its own "set of users", right?
>
> Yes, each LDAP have list of his users. For each LDAP entry we have a record 
> telling us, who is the Mail server for that user. So if the balancer send 
> user "test" to mail server1 and from the LDAP we see that "test" user belong 
> to server1 then "test" request is served, ELSE if user "test" has mail server 
> set on "mailserver3" for example, the request is redirect to mailserver3 that 
> will handle his request.

Cool, I have implemented a similar approach, but on postfix level, ie,
each smtp server can receive mail for any user, and then look for the
smtp server on a ldap attribute (I use maildrop attr for that).  I use
this to have a "distributed email system", so that each user have its
mail "locally" on the locality he/she works.  If one server is
unavailable, the system will keep the mail queued until the
corresponding server is back, so: no HA here.

>
>
>> >
>> > if one server goes down, the one next to him will Up his ip address and 
>> > mount his partition on the storage untill the server restarts correctly.
>>
>> Now, this is more typical of HA clusters, what gets me confused is
>> what I asked on the last question, so, when say, server 1 goes down,
>> server 2 mount server1's home partition and start getting mails (and
>> serving IMAP requests) as if it were server1, right? I'll reserve my
>> other comments until I get more information on this.
>
> Yes, if server1 goes down the cluster will mount up server1 interface and 
> home partition on server2. Server2 will temporarily act as server1 and 
> server2 untill server1 is back on line.

Ok.

>
>
>
>
>> > 1) I've never used Courier IMAP, but reading on the internet i've found 
>> > that it use gethostbyname() to resolve and this may cause an infinite loop 
>> > for a host with 2 interface but one hostname if one server goes down.
>> > So, i'm afraid that i will be able to installa courier-imap on each server 
>> > and this will cause a big problem to the scalability of the system.
>> >
>> > 2) Has anyone ever tryed something like this and its ablet to redirect me 
>> > to some good documentation?
>>
>> I don't use Courier (several reasons, off-topic here), I use Dovecot
>> (I can even use SASL from Dovecot to authenticate Postifx's smtp,
>> really handy along with reject_authenticated_sender_login_mismatch and
>> smtpd_sender_login_maps on ldap).
>
> Nice, i gave a look to this Dovecot and its looks pretty nice! i'vent tested 
> it yet but it seems it can be a valid alternative. Im trying to move from 
> Qmail to postfix because Qmail is patch-project(dead), while i think Postfix 
> is a valid alternative that will make life a lot easyer.

postfix is extremely flexible.  Believe me: you can replace qmail with
*no* changes to your ldap entries.

Your project looks interesting,

Ildefonso Camargo

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