Re: [courier-users] World domination update.
Eduardo Roldan wrote: On Thu, 2003-03-20 at 02:29, Sam Varshavchik wrote: Came across the following while browsing: http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/compfac/ohjeet/posti/uudistus2003.en.html#technical You should add a 'Success Stories' page to courier mta site. :) Seriously. Maybe a form to submit existent deployments of courier-mta helps new users get confident. Indeed. Such a thing would have helped me out the first time I tried to migrate to Courier at Real Networks. It would be helpful to have a list of users, and maybe throw in some hardware specs, configuration details, and performance metrics. This weekend we're replacing a $50,000 machine that's running sendmail with a small cluster running Courier. The old system is one server running Slackware Linux 8.0, dual 933 Mhz proc, 2GB RAM, 700GB of disk that's mostly unusable, and averages a load of 40-50 during the afternoon. On the 13th (just to pick a day) there were 74 errors due to insufficient resources (procmail either didn't start or segv'd) and 8944 errors talking to another local sendmail server (the outbound MX) out of 141542 messages total. Only 19611 messages were destined for other mail servers. Delivery times ranged from 1 second to almost 3 hours (the long delays are the result of the procmail errors). The system supports fewer than 1000 users, but is very sluggish and requires a lot of maintenance. The new system cost about $15000. It is built with an NFS backend running Red Hat Linux 7.3 on a 1TB RAID 5 set attached to a 3ware 7500 card, one 1.8 Ghz CPU and 1GB of RAM. There are two Courier servers configured identically, load balanced with DNS round-robin. Each has an 800Mhz CPU and 500 MB of RAM; they're RLX Technologies 300i blades and they also run Red Hat Linux 7.3. Mail is filtered through spamassassin (spamd) and amavis/OpenAntiVirus. For backward compatibility, POP3 service is provided by qmail-popup with an APOP checkpw. All other mail services (including POP3S) are provided by Courier.User information is stored in an iPlanet directory server. Although these systems have a fraction of the hardware resources, and a good deal of additional processing, we expect their capacity to be 5 to 10 times that of the old sendmail system (our tests indicate so, but real life use may prove different). If we're still discussing it then, I'll provide performance metrics on the new system after it goes live. If anyone has any comments on the new system's setup, my managers are interested in feedback from other Courier users. --- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Tablet PC. Does your code think in ink? You could win a Tablet PC. Get a free Tablet PC hat just for playing. What are you waiting for? http://ads.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/redirect.pl?micr5043en ___ courier-users mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/courier-users
Re: [courier-users] World domination update.
On Thu, 20 Mar 2003, Gordon Messmer wrote: .. The new system cost about $15000. It is built with an NFS backend running Red Hat Linux 7.3 on a 1TB RAID 5 set attached to a 3ware 7500 card, one 1.8 Ghz CPU and 1GB of RAM. There are two Courier servers configured identically, load balanced with DNS round-robin. Each has an I would strongly suggest taking a good look at: http://www.linuxvirtualserver.org/Documents.html specifically http://www.linuxvirtualserver.org/VS-NAT.html DNS round-robin has /so/ many problems -- you have to set the ttl incredibly low for it to work at all, and /many/ email clients /cache/ the IP beyond the ttl. Thus, if you name your servers A and B, and A goes down (and A is the primary), many clients will continue trying to contact A despite it being down and the ttl having long expired. The LVR/NAT and LVS/DR solutions are much better from a high level perspective. Heck, you could probably get away with a Pentium 200 level machine as the NAT/DR router - it just passes and mangles packets. -- Applying computer technology is simply finding the right wrench to pound in the correct screw. Jon Nelson [EMAIL PROTECTED] C and Python Code Gardener --- This sf.net email is sponsored by:ThinkGeek Welcome to geek heaven. http://thinkgeek.com/sf ___ courier-users mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/courier-users
Re: [courier-users] World domination update.
while we're on the subject. we currently have about 4000 addresses in the database, running on a (backup) netfinity 3300 (Dual 450 Xeon, 256 megs, 18 Gigabytes in Raid5) my primary mail server recently blew up (major hardware problems, not courier's fault) and i'm in the process of building a new one. to be sure i'm going for a cluster of servers using CODA as the filesystem backend. has anyone implemented such a cluster? i know a lot of peoples uses nfs. the problem with nfs is if the primary server goes down you're out of luck. coda's support for disconnected operations and server replication makes it ideal for such a task, especially with the maildir format. i'm a bit concerned about the performances though. your experiences? does it work? does it not? why? -- Daniel Higgins Administrateur Système / System Administrator Netcommunications Inc. Tel: (450) 346-3401 (st-jean) (514) 871-1844 (montréal) Fax: (450) 346-3587 http://www.netc.net - Original Message - From: Gordon Messmer [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Courier Mailing List [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, March 20, 2003 12:58 PM Subject: Re: [courier-users] World domination update. Eduardo Roldan wrote: On Thu, 2003-03-20 at 02:29, Sam Varshavchik wrote: Came across the following while browsing: http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/compfac/ohjeet/posti/uudistus2003.en.html#techni cal You should add a 'Success Stories' page to courier mta site. :) Seriously. Maybe a form to submit existent deployments of courier-mta helps new users get confident. Indeed. Such a thing would have helped me out the first time I tried to migrate to Courier at Real Networks. It would be helpful to have a list of users, and maybe throw in some hardware specs, configuration details, and performance metrics. This weekend we're replacing a $50,000 machine that's running sendmail with a small cluster running Courier. The old system is one server running Slackware Linux 8.0, dual 933 Mhz proc, 2GB RAM, 700GB of disk that's mostly unusable, and averages a load of 40-50 during the afternoon. On the 13th (just to pick a day) there were 74 errors due to insufficient resources (procmail either didn't start or segv'd) and 8944 errors talking to another local sendmail server (the outbound MX) out of 141542 messages total. Only 19611 messages were destined for other mail servers. Delivery times ranged from 1 second to almost 3 hours (the long delays are the result of the procmail errors). The system supports fewer than 1000 users, but is very sluggish and requires a lot of maintenance. The new system cost about $15000. It is built with an NFS backend running Red Hat Linux 7.3 on a 1TB RAID 5 set attached to a 3ware 7500 card, one 1.8 Ghz CPU and 1GB of RAM. There are two Courier servers configured identically, load balanced with DNS round-robin. Each has an 800Mhz CPU and 500 MB of RAM; they're RLX Technologies 300i blades and they also run Red Hat Linux 7.3. Mail is filtered through spamassassin (spamd) and amavis/OpenAntiVirus. For backward compatibility, POP3 service is provided by qmail-popup with an APOP checkpw. All other mail services (including POP3S) are provided by Courier.User information is stored in an iPlanet directory server. Although these systems have a fraction of the hardware resources, and a good deal of additional processing, we expect their capacity to be 5 to 10 times that of the old sendmail system (our tests indicate so, but real life use may prove different). If we're still discussing it then, I'll provide performance metrics on the new system after it goes live. If anyone has any comments on the new system's setup, my managers are interested in feedback from other Courier users. --- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Tablet PC. Does your code think in ink? You could win a Tablet PC. Get a free Tablet PC hat just for playing. What are you waiting for? http://ads.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/redirect.pl?micr5043en ___ courier-users mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/courier-users --- This sf.net email is sponsored by:ThinkGeek Welcome to geek heaven. http://thinkgeek.com/sf ___ courier-users mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/courier-users
Re: [courier-users] World domination update.
On Sat, 22 Mar 2003 12:43 am, Daniel Higgins wrote: while we're on the subject. we currently have about 4000 addresses in the database, running on a (backup) netfinity 3300 (Dual 450 Xeon, 256 megs, 18 Gigabytes in Raid5) ... We now run the full courier kit + RADIUS (3k hits/day) + regular LAMP server + ftp all on a single PIII 1k CPU with 900mb of effective ram with at least 4000 active mailboxes. All auth in MySQL with no shell accounts and the CPU sits around 90%. The main things are courier itself, maildir format = no (b)locking, and no PAM /etc/passwd lookups (approx every 2-5 secs) at all. One awkwardness is the gig per day of mail logs I've yet to figure out what to do with. --markc --- This SF.net email is sponsored by:Crypto Challenge is now open! Get cracking and register here for some mind boggling fun and the chance of winning an Apple iPod: http://ads.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/redirect.pl?thaw0031en ___ courier-users mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/courier-users
Re: [courier-users] World domination update.
Jon Nelson wrote: On Thu, 20 Mar 2003, Gordon Messmer wrote: The new system cost about $15000. It is built with an NFS backend running Red Hat Linux 7.3 on a 1TB RAID 5 set attached to a 3ware 7500 card, one 1.8 Ghz CPU and 1GB of RAM. There are two Courier servers configured identically, load balanced with DNS round-robin. Each has an I would strongly suggest taking a good look at: http://www.linuxvirtualserver.org/Documents.html I'm well aware of LVS techniques. I can't, however, see fit to justify throwing in two servers (without failover, LVS becomes a single point of failure) in order to provide load-balancing and fail-over to two other servers. At some point that will likely change, but when it does the LVS boxes will be providing service to other services in the network, like our LDAP boxes, in addition to the email servers. DNS round-robin has /so/ many problems -- you have to set the ttl incredibly low for it to work at all That's not correct. ping mail-test.real.com ten times and you should get about half of the lookups to one box, and half to the other. and /many/ email clients /cache/ the IP beyond the ttl. Thus, if you name your servers A and B, and A goes down (and A is the primary), many clients will continue trying to contact A despite it being down and the ttl having long expired. There's no primary in a round-robin. Each server is equal. Clients that we've tested work as intended in the event of failure. HA will be introduced later on. The LVR/NAT and LVS/DR solutions are much better from a high level perspective. Heck, you could probably get away with a Pentium 200 level machine as the NAT/DR router - it just passes and mangles packets. What sense does it make to spend 15K on a cluster of boxes and then skimp on the HA gateways? --- This SF.net email is sponsored by:Crypto Challenge is now open! Get cracking and register here for some mind boggling fun and the chance of winning an Apple iPod: http://ads.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/redirect.pl?thaw0031en ___ courier-users mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/courier-users
Re: [courier-users] World domination update.
On Fri, 21 Mar 2003, Gordon Messmer wrote: Jon Nelson wrote: On Thu, 20 Mar 2003, Gordon Messmer wrote: The new system cost about $15000. It is built with an NFS backend running Red Hat Linux 7.3 on a 1TB RAID 5 set attached to a 3ware 7500 card, one 1.8 Ghz CPU and 1GB of RAM. There are two Courier servers configured identically, load balanced with DNS round-robin. Each has an I would strongly suggest taking a good look at: http://www.linuxvirtualserver.org/Documents.html I'm well aware of LVS techniques. I can't, however, see fit to justify throwing in two servers (without failover, LVS becomes a single point of failure) in order to provide load-balancing and fail-over to two other servers. At some point that will likely change, but when it does the LVS boxes will be providing service to other services in the network, like our LDAP boxes, in addition to the email servers. DNS round-robin has /so/ many problems -- you have to set the ttl incredibly low for it to work at all That's not correct. ping mail-test.real.com ten times and you should get about half of the lookups to one box, and half to the other. The problems I'm talking about involve /caching/ of the response. The typical ttl on a response is usually 24 hours. Even /if/ your network is set up such that clients ask the server directly when resolving, /and/ the clients *don't* do any caching, you *still* get roughly 50% of the answers wrong. By wrong I mean I'll get an IP for a server that isn't up. and /many/ email clients /cache/ the IP beyond the ttl. Thus, if you name your servers A and B, and A goes down (and A is the primary), many clients will continue trying to contact A despite it being down and the ttl having long expired. There's no primary in a round-robin. Each server is equal. Clients that we've tested work as intended in the event of failure. HA will be introduced later on. That's exactly the problem. Server A goes down. Client X says, resolve mail.domain for me, and gets the /IP/ for A, roughly 50% of the time. By your own statements, if I ping mail-test.real.com ten times, I get roughly 50% ICMP packets sent to one host, the remainder to the other. If one of those hosts is /down/, DNS round-robin *doesn't change the fact that roughly 50% of my packets will be destined for a downed host*. Are you performing some type of availability test /on/ the DNS server such that if A goes down resolutions for mail-test.real.com always return B? The LVR/NAT and LVS/DR solutions are much better from a high level perspective. Heck, you could probably get away with a Pentium 200 level machine as the NAT/DR router - it just passes and mangles packets. What sense does it make to spend 15K on a cluster of boxes and then skimp on the HA gateways? Who says you are skimping? If you need a certain amount of horsepower to perform a job, why bother with grossly exceeding that limit? -- Applying computer technology is simply finding the right wrench to pound in the correct screw. Jon Nelson [EMAIL PROTECTED] C and Python Code Gardener --- This SF.net email is sponsored by:Crypto Challenge is now open! Get cracking and register here for some mind boggling fun and the chance of winning an Apple iPod: http://ads.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/redirect.pl?thaw0031en ___ courier-users mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/courier-users
Re: [courier-users] World domination update.
On Thu, 2003-03-20 at 02:29, Sam Varshavchik wrote: Came across the following while browsing: http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/compfac/ohjeet/posti/uudistus2003.en.html#technical You should add a 'Success Stories' page to courier mta site. :) Seriously. Maybe a form to submit existent deployments of courier-mta helps new users get confident. -- Eduardo Roldan [EMAIL PROTECTED] --- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Tablet PC. Does your code think in ink? You could win a Tablet PC. Get a free Tablet PC hat just for playing. What are you waiting for? http://ads.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/redirect.pl?micr5043en ___ courier-users mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/courier-users
RE: [courier-users] World domination update.
Also - if a few fields were requested (user base size, hardware and number of machines) it could tell us something about the average user. -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Eduardo Roldan Sent: Thursday, March 20, 2003 7:58 AM To: Courier Mailing List Subject: Re: [courier-users] World domination update. On Thu, 2003-03-20 at 02:29, Sam Varshavchik wrote: Came across the following while browsing: http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/compfac/ohjeet/posti/uudistus2003.en.html#technica l You should add a 'Success Stories' page to courier mta site. :) Seriously. Maybe a form to submit existent deployments of courier-mta helps new users get confident. -- Eduardo Roldan [EMAIL PROTECTED] --- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Tablet PC. Does your code think in ink? You could win a Tablet PC. Get a free Tablet PC hat just for playing. What are you waiting for? http://ads.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/redirect.pl?micr5043en ___ courier-users mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/courier-users --- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Tablet PC. Does your code think in ink? You could win a Tablet PC. Get a free Tablet PC hat just for playing. What are you waiting for? http://ads.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/redirect.pl?micr5043en ___ courier-users mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/courier-users
[courier-users] World domination update.
Came across the following while browsing: http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/compfac/ohjeet/posti/uudistus2003.en.html#technical --- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Does your code think in ink? You could win a Tablet PC. Get a free Tablet PC hat just for playing. What are you waiting for? http://ads.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/redirect.pl?micr5043en ___ courier-users mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/courier-users
