Brett Randall wrote:
>
> Well...I have a little 2c to chuck in as well
>
> I have just finished designing a system (and implementing it) for our
> corporation that allows distributed e-mail across a city, with hundreds,
> possibly thousands, of different locations either dialing up or being
> permanently connected to our main relay. And all e-mail is sent to
> [EMAIL PROTECTED], no subdomains (although we have set it up to allow for
> virtual domains in the future), and is delivered to the correct location.
>
> All the e-mail is relayed to NFS shares on client machines around Sydney,
> uing Qmail's maildir delivery format. If an NFS share is down (ie a site
> hasn't dialed up recently or an ISDN link has failed), then it is deferred
> for up to a week - simplistic but it works. All users can check their e-mail
> internally from their local server or externally from the main server (only
> internet viewable machine in the entire network, and even then through a
> router) via NIS.
>
> Why go to all this trouble? You may say. Why not just use aliases? Because
> aliases can create excess traffic, bouncing e-mails when servers are down
> and the like. The aim of this project was to make network traffic across the
> whole network as small as possible, with reliability for as many locations
> as possible and the ability for smaller ones to only have to dial in
> (similar to UUCP). This way, the only network traffic is an e-mail being
> transferred to an NFS share, and all employees are happy. If a server goes
> down, no others are affected (except if the master server was to go down,
> but even then POP and SMTP will still work, just being deferred until it
> comes up again). We are also working on a redundant server for when a link
> goes down or the server has a failure.
>
> If you're still reading, congratulations you might be interested in all
> this. I am considering writing a HOWTO for this (Reliable and Efficient
> Distributed e-mail (REDE) across endless locations) if anybody wants it,
> because I have to document it all anyway for the corporation. There might
> already be something already out there, I dunno. But it was a great learning
> experience for me in Qmail, NFS, NIS, network infrastructure between
> locations... If anybody is interested in a HOWTO in the future, please
> e-mail me personally.
I would be interested just out of curitosity
Greg Cope
> Regards
>
> Brett Randall
