Quoting Alan Brown ([EMAIL PROTECTED]): > On Wed, 26 Feb 2003, Kenneth Porter wrote: > > > That sounds backwards. Have all mail delivered to a hub, which then > > delivers it to multiple machines running POP3 and IMAP services. > > > > Perhaps you could post info explaining your motivation for wanting such a > > beast? > > High Availability pop3 access springs to mind. > > There are probably better ways though.
So again, we have someone asking how to do what they think is the solution rather than presenting the problem. Can you have multiple deliverers and poppers over NFS? Sure, write your own locking, rewrite mail.local and qpopper chunks, deal with the fact that NFS performance is likely 5-10% the performance of RAID for several times the cost. Never quit, because only you can run it. Nick Christensen has a lovely paper on what they did while he was at Earthlink. (see http://www.jetcafe.org/npc/doc/mail_arch.html) Sendmail, Inc (with Nick) also implemented this notion (version 2?) several years ago. Big NFS servers, front end machines. Locking is hard, much hacking was done. I had some involvement in this too. Useful when you have 1-2 million users. Will grow to more (especially now that we have 15k RPM disks and cheap(ish) NVRAM disks). Mostly not useful when you don't. I can run 200,000 IMAP users on a single box and run HA or a cold spare if I need. (HA has several instrinsic costs that make it not an automatic "yes")
