According to Racer X:
>
> My conclusion - Mounting the queue dir over NFS may very well be possible
> assuming you can count on certain things. However, there's no way I would
> EVER do it, and you're probably asking for trouble if you do.
>
> I'm sure you've thought about this issue and have good reasons for wanting
> to do this, but I'm curious to know why you need to put queues on each of
> these machines with "limited space." If these machines were diskless (or
> near-diskless) workstations, you'd be better off setting each machine up to
> relay to a central hub.
>
> You say this is for a server setup though, so I'm assuming the machines
> aren't diskless. Given that these are servers, they must have at least some
> reasonable amount of local disk in them, so you've almost certainly got
> enough room to put a queue on them.
Our configuration will handle a very large number of users. We have a
dedicated 'farm' of servers (SPARC Ultra 2's) which will be dedicated
for outbound SMTP relay traffic for our users. Access to these
machines are done via a redirector (e.g. BigIP) so as to handle both
load balancing and automatically deal with failures/crashes.
We know from experience that when something bad happens upstream
(network related on the Internet or sometimes with some large ISPs such
as AOL), that outbound mail queues can quickly fill up and start
causing havoc on the SMTP relays as their queues can quickly grow large
during peak hours and fill up your local disk. We want to avoid to
have to deal with this issue, and also provide the ability for another
SMTP machine to take over an outbound mail queue in the event of a hard
failure of a SMTP relay box. Also the NFS server (a NetApp machine)
provides additional protection because of it's RAID configuration.
Users really get upset when you loose their mail.
Thanks for the feedback.
--curtis
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: Curtis Generous <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Sent: Mon 1 Nov 1999 14.04
> Subject: NFS mounted /var/qmail/queue directory
>
>
> > Is it possible (and safe) to use an NFS mounted /var/qmail/queue/*
> directory?
> >
> > [NOTE: I'm _not_ advocating sharing /var/qmail/queue/* tree between
> > several qmail servers via NFS, but instead want to use an NFS filesystem
> > for the /var/qmail/queue/* tree instead of using local disks which have
> > limited space on them in our configuration.]
> >
> > We have a NetApp 760 filer with lots of disks, and it makes better
> > sense to use those disks rather than buying external disk packs to
> > attach to our QMAIL servers (on which we already use NFS mounted
> > MAILDIR for user mailboxes).
> >
> > There was a thread on this topic a couple of years ago but no resolution
> > to this issue. Here is that URL:
> >
> >
> http://www.ornl.gov/its/archives/mailing-lists/qmail/1997/04/msg00619.html
> >
> > Would Appreciate any feedback/comments on this issue.
> >
> > Thanks,
> >
> > --curtis
