> I think you need to give us a better idea of the big picture. The first post
> made it sound like a single machine, now you talk about NFS servers, multiple
> IP addresses, separate access server, etc.
Fair enough, I thought i was going to be able to sneak this one in as a
small question. I guess not.
My boss says that I need to design a system to send and receive mail (not
through imap or pop) that can scale feasibly to millions of users down the
road; It will start small and get larger. Bearing that in mind, and the
hopeful growth of out revenue, id like to start out cheap.
I envisioned two or more qmail servers sending and receiveing mail behind
a load balancer. I was of the understanding that trying to route all mail
through one smtp server was a bad idea as smtp negotations can be slow. So
I figured if the load balancer would round robin smtp requests to multiple
machines each running multiple qmail servers, i might get the most out of
my money.
So now I have multiple qmail servers per box, each box now having multiple
queues. There may also be a need to priortize mail by sender (route al
incoming hotmail or the like to its own queue) but i can worry about that
later.
For now the user directories will be over nfs, but that can be upgraded
later as well. There will be seperate machines for dealing with access to
the nfs server (for user interaction) but ultimately, outbound mail will
be move through qmail aswell. Authentication of users is handles on this
side aswell (with in house work).
Is my thinking wrong? I am curious as to how to construct the multiple
queue boxes, and to see who else has has success/problems with it.
thanx,
jeff...
