Re: [CentOS] Mail server setup for small ISP

[Matt]

> It's been awhile since I looked into it, but I recommend outsourcing your
> email.
>
> Companies like fusemail (http://www.fusemail.com/solutions/resellers.html )
> will give you accounts at $0.69/month/account for a 1GB account (last time I
> checked anyway). They provide an API and a dashboard for managing it. They
> also handle backups, I believe (read the fine print before you trust me). I
> think there is spam filtering and anti-virus built in too.

Kept thinking that as well.  Only issue is that 0.69 x 2000 equals a
pretty good chunk of change for us.  One thing I would reccommend
though is putting it in a colocation facillity rather then local.
Also start with a beefy machine because its a real pain to upgrade
later.

Matt
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Re: [CentOS] Mail server setup for small ISP

[Matt]

>I will probably have to design an e-mail (and other components)
> infrastructure for a small ISP soon (WISP).
>
>I'm doing some research to determine which components would be best to
> offer e-mail services to their client and allow the staff to manage
> accounts easily.
>
>I usually use virtual machines a lot for isolation and easy backups and
> migration (when a hardware node is underpowered, it is easy to migrate
> one or more virtual machines to another hardware node easily).
>
>I have looked at iSCSI and drbd for high-availability of the storage:
> http://www.pcpro.co.uk/realworld/82284/san-on-the-cheap/page1.html.
>
> This looks like it should be doing a great job of high availability storage.
>
>For mail server, I guess I should look at an MTA and IMAP/POP server
> that supports LDAP and/or MySQL for users.  Postfix should be a good
> choice for MTA, as I know it (at least a little, but I know sendmail
> better).  For IMAP/POP, I'm not sure...  Would dovecot be sufficient, or
> should I try cyrus.  I'd rather use components that are available for
> base or extras repository (or rpmforge).  I think that squirrelmail and
> horde would do a good job for webmail.
>
>There shoudn't be any troubles having some redundancy for DNS, web
> servers, mtas, but what about IMAP/POP? linux-HA?  MySQL replication
> should be enough, I guess.  Or maybe linux-HA as well.  I wonder if I
> should add GFS to the mix to have multiple IMAP/POP servers use the same
> storage.  Or maybe IMAP proxies?
>
>Any insights welcome :).

www.directadmin.com

Been running it on CentOS for years.  Added Clamav and spamassassin to
it.  It utilizes Exim and dovecot along with standard bind and apache
stuff.  You pay monthly or yearly license fee.  Its pretty cheap
really.  You can also pay a one time fee for a given machine.

Matt
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Re: [CentOS] Mail server setup for small ISP

[Ralph Angenendt]

Gary Richardson wrote:
> It's been awhile since I looked into it, but I recommend outsourcing your
> email.

Erks. I wonder why *anyone* in his sane mind would do so (okay, here it
is smallish ISP but I - as a customer - trust my ISP to handle my mail
and would get another ISP as soon as I knew that it is outsourcing mail).

>>For mail server, I guess I should look at an MTA and IMAP/POP
>> server
>> that supports LDAP and/or MySQL for users.  Postfix should be a good
>> choice for MTA, as I know it (at least a little, but I know sendmail
>> better).  

Then why not use sendmail? Once it is configured properly, maintaining
users is the same as with other MTAs.

>> For IMAP/POP, I'm not sure...  Would dovecot be sufficient, or
>> should I try cyrus.  I'd rather use components that are available for
>> base or extras repository (or rpmforge).  I think that squirrelmail and
>> horde would do a good job for webmail.

I've heard that dovecot scales pretty good. If you want to be on the
safe side, cyrus probably scales way beyond what you need, but is also
harder to maintain.

>>There shoudn't be any troubles having some redundancy for DNS, web
>> servers, mtas, but what about IMAP/POP?

If you're already thinking about drbd - why not share the imap store
also? And: There still is the Cyrus Murder for bigger setups, which
allows for flexibility within IMAP frontend and backend servers.

>>   Or maybe IMAP proxies?

See 
which should answer most of your questions regarding HA within an imap
setup.

Cheers,

Ralph


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Re: [CentOS] Mail server setup for small ISP

[Bill Campbell]

On Thu, Jan 03, 2008, Ugo Bellavance wrote:
>Hi,

>I will probably have to design an e-mail (and other components)
>infrastructure for a small ISP soon (WISP).

See my previous post on sizing mail servers.  The setup there is
in use at several of our regional ISP customers, and has been
very solid.  It's a design that has evolved since we started
building and selling systems for ISPs in 1994.

>I'm doing some research to determine which components would be best to
>offer e-mail services to their client and allow the staff to manage
>accounts easily.

There are various tools available to do this.  I have set up very
restricted webmin configurations so the support people at the ISP
could do the necessary things easily with minimal chance of major
screwups (after I've patched some things in webmmin that allowed
it to remove /home when somebody typed in a bad directory :-).

>I usually use virtual machines a lot for isolation and easy backups and
>migration (when a hardware node is underpowered, it is easy to migrate one
>or more virtual machines to another hardware node easily).

>I have looked at iSCSI and drbd for high-availability of the storage:
>http://www.pcpro.co.uk/realworld/82284/san-on-the-cheap/page1.html.

>This looks like it should be doing a great job of high availability
>storage.

>For mail server, I guess I should look at an MTA and IMAP/POP server that
>supports LDAP and/or MySQL for users.  Postfix should be a good choice for
>MTA, as I know it (at least a little, but I know sendmail better).  For
>IMAP/POP, I'm not sure...  Would dovecot be sufficient, or should I try
>cyrus.  I'd rather use components that are available for base or extras
>repository (or rpmforge).  I think that squirrelmail and horde would do a
>good job for webmail.

The systems we build have postfix/amavise/clamav, courier-imap,
and usually horde/imp for webmail.  I personally don't like Cyrus
as I prefer to use standard Maildir which allows easy clustering
for mail delivery and IMAP/POP access.

>There shoudn't be any troubles having some redundancy for DNS, web servers,
>mtas, but what about IMAP/POP? linux-HA?  MySQL replication should be
>enough, I guess.  Or maybe linux-HA as well.  I wonder if I should add GFS
>to the mix to have multiple IMAP/POP servers use the same storage.  Or
>maybe IMAP proxies?
>
>   Any insights welcome :).

I hope you're not charging your client for your learning curve.

Bill
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Re: [CentOS] Mail server setup for small ISP

[Gary Richardson]

It's been awhile since I looked into it, but I recommend outsourcing your
email.

Companies like fusemail (http://www.fusemail.com/solutions/resellers.html)
will give you accounts at $0.69/month/account for a 1GB account (last time I
checked anyway). They provide an API and a dashboard for managing it. They
also handle backups, I believe (read the fine print before you trust me). I
think there is spam filtering and anti-virus built in too.

On Jan 3, 2008 9:09 AM, Ugo Bellavance <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> Hi,
>
>I will probably have to design an e-mail (and other components)
> infrastructure for a small ISP soon (WISP).
>
>I'm doing some research to determine which components would be best
> to
> offer e-mail services to their client and allow the staff to manage
> accounts easily.
>
>I usually use virtual machines a lot for isolation and easy backups
> and
> migration (when a hardware node is underpowered, it is easy to migrate
> one or more virtual machines to another hardware node easily).
>
>I have looked at iSCSI and drbd for high-availability of the
> storage:
> http://www.pcpro.co.uk/realworld/82284/san-on-the-cheap/page1.html.
>
> This looks like it should be doing a great job of high availability
> storage.
>
>For mail server, I guess I should look at an MTA and IMAP/POP
> server
> that supports LDAP and/or MySQL for users.  Postfix should be a good
> choice for MTA, as I know it (at least a little, but I know sendmail
> better).  For IMAP/POP, I'm not sure...  Would dovecot be sufficient, or
> should I try cyrus.  I'd rather use components that are available for
> base or extras repository (or rpmforge).  I think that squirrelmail and
> horde would do a good job for webmail.
>
>There shoudn't be any troubles having some redundancy for DNS, web
> servers, mtas, but what about IMAP/POP? linux-HA?  MySQL replication
> should be enough, I guess.  Or maybe linux-HA as well.  I wonder if I
> should add GFS to the mix to have multiple IMAP/POP servers use the same
> storage.  Or maybe IMAP proxies?
>
>Any insights welcome :).
>
> Ugo
>
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Re: [CentOS] Mail server setup for small ISP

[Fajar Priyanto]

On Friday 04 January 2008 00:09:06 Ugo Bellavance wrote:
> I think that squirrelmail and
> horde would do a good job for webmail.
>
>   There shoudn't be any troubles having some redundancy for DNS, web
> servers, mtas, but what about IMAP/POP? linux-HA?  MySQL replication
> should be enough, I guess.  Or maybe linux-HA as well.  I wonder if I
> should add GFS to the mix to have multiple IMAP/POP servers use the same
> storage.  Or maybe IMAP proxies?
>
>   Any insights welcome :).

Hi Ugo,
Congrats on your plan opening the ISP.
For webmail, a professional touch would be nice for your customer. Instead of 
using plain squirrelmail, try using http://www.nutsmail.com/ instead.

AFAIK, redundancy for mail server seldom uses linux-ha/any other failover 
stuffs. It is most common to use 'backup MX' in DNS settings. So, when the 
main server in unreachable, the sender mail server would try to the secondary 
MX through DNS query. 

-- 
Fajar Priyanto | Reg'd Linux User #327841 | Linux tutorial 
http://linux2.arinet.org
08:25:18 up 51 min, 2.6.22-14-generic GNU/Linux 
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