Michael Boman wrote:
>
> On Mon, Dec 27, 1999 at 08:33:10AM -0500, Dave Sill wrote:
> > Michael Boman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> >
> > >On Mon, Dec 27, 1999 at 07:08:01AM -0500, Dave Sill wrote:
> > >>
> > >> /var/qmail can't be shared, and shouldn't be remote.
> > >
> > >How can the mailservers help each other with outgoing mail then?
> >
> > There's really no way to have multiple servers responsible for
> > delivering the same message. You can spread the load across multiple
> > servers, but each server will be solely responsible for its messages.
> >
> > >Is /var/qmail/queue enough to share for that, or is each server for
> > >itself?
> >
> > You can't share /var/qmail/queue.
> Let me see if I get this right, it is OK to share the /home/vpopmail
> directory, but not the others? Anyone have ideas how to keep the qmail
> controlfiles etc up-to-date on each computer, or can I just share that
> directory (/var/qmail/control and maybe /var/qmail/alias).
>
> Please advice
Where I worked in the UK we used several machines (post.salford.ac.uk)
which
shared the same configuration; this was periodically updated using two
files, one of which contained the length of the other file to ensure
they were copied correctly between machines. (the copying being
performed using ssh -- so corruption and security was not an issue). The
machines acted purely as message switches storing no messages locally
(unless the destination machine was down) If we needed to add more
switching capacity another machine could be easily added to the cluster.
If a machine blew up or needed upgrading we could take it out of the
cluster and it would not affect the others directly.
I do not think NFS is a reliable mechanism for sharing configuration
files for reliable delivery. I like systems to be minimally dependent on
others during normal operation.
oh, the post servers could have been writing the mail into pop mailboxes
over NFS, except we were using SMTP to move it to the pop mail servers
which wrote locally. If qmtp had been built into the qmail-remote
servers we would probably have used that too.
Richard Letts,
Austin, Texas
