On Thu, May 04, 2000 at 10:54:09AM -0700, Mark Douglas wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I'm currently investigating setting up a Qmail server for a local ISP who is
> having some problems with it's local setup. I've done some work with Qmail,
> however I've never built a production server with it. I'm just wondering
> what kind of system specs you would recommend for a server that is going to
> start out hosting approximately 700 users, with a max of 120 being able to
Notwithstanding that these are pretty unusual ratios for an ISP, 700 users is
a very small number if you're talking about just SMTP, POP3 and some form of
standard authentication, such as NIS+, /etc/passwd.
> access the system at a time. I would like these specs to be mid to high end
> requirements for this setup, to leave a fair amount of room for expanding
> without having to do any work on the server itself.
If I know a system is likely to expand a lot, what I do is ensure that the
system can be distributed at a later stage, this can mean something as simple
as careful selection of DNS names and multi-homing and tcpserver.
Eg, make sure they use smtp.some.domain for sending, pop.some.domain for
fetching and have these on separate IP addresses.
For ISPs with 5000-10000 I typically see a single pentium box with decent
scsi spindles doing just fine. The most important thing is probably ensuring
you have room to grow disk-wise and spindle-wise. So starting with a scsi
controller disk subsystem with a couple of spindles is probably the most
important thing you can do.
Regards.
