Re: [WISPA] Mail server setup
Currently our hosting package does everything. It's currently on a server off-network, but I'm looking to move it onto the network. I really support the virtualization. Far too many people don't understand the ease\importance of doing this. I had a P3 - 800 that had about a dozen virtual hosts on it. I assembled a 64 bit AMD system with 6x the RAM and moving the virtual hosts over was easy as pie vs. having to redo everything. I spent maybe a half hour moving everything over and it was my first time. I am looking at modusMail when I really get into the swing of things, but for now will just be sticking with the mail capabilities of my InterWorx hosting package. - Mike Hammett Intelligent Computing Solutions http://www.ics-il.com - Original Message - From: Ugo Bellavance [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: wireless@wispa.org Sent: Sunday, January 06, 2008 3:44 PM Subject: [WISPA] Mail server setup 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 WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/ WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/
Re: [WISPA] Mail server setup
On Sun, January 6, 2008 3:44 pm, Ugo Bellavance wrote: I will probably have to design an e-mail (and other components) infrastructure for a small ISP soon (WISP). How small is small? That will be the single biggest issue in deciding just what you need. Honestly, all the multiply-redundant backend stuff and virtual-machine-migration and hyper-scalable backends sound seriously overkill for most of what I'd consider small. That aside, I'd strongly suggest against dovecot for your mail service. It doesn't seem to scale all that well, in my (admittedly limited) experience. Cyrus and Courier both can be set up to use MySQL for most of the backend stuff; MySQL replication and maybe a front-end load-balancer of some sort should get you more redundancy than you'll ever need (unless you're dealing with really strict SLAs, et cetera). David Smith MVN.net WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/
Re: [WISPA] Mail server setup
David E. Smith wrote: How small is small? That will be the single biggest issue in deciding just what you need. Honestly, all the multiply-redundant backend stuff and virtual-machine-migration and hyper-scalable backends sound seriously overkill for most of what I'd consider small. Agreed We use a single Pentium 4 machine, plus a NFS server on the backend to provide service to something like 7000 mailboxes in our environment.FreeBSD/Qmail/Spamassassin/etc. For values of small much less than what we are running, I would really be outsourcing all of this elsewhere Mail is a pain, and I'd really prefer to outsource it.. But with the going rate for email hosting being such that I could hire a person full time to just run the mail server, we keep it in house... -forrest WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/
Re: [WISPA] Mail server setup
Have you considered http://www.google.com/a? Free, awesome, and ever-so-easy to administer. I just don't see the point of bothering with your own mail server. On Jan 6, 2008 3:44 PM, 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 WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/ -- Dylan Oliver Primaverity, LLC WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/
