Ryan Leathers wrote:
Does it matter what machine processes your request? Is it possible to have different boxes responsible for fulfilling any particular request? Originally I wasn't reading closely enough to realize that you were automating a task other than the recieval of email - my bad there. If your secondary server is configured to accept all mail locally for the automation domain as well, and forward any accounts in your regular domain to the normal mail server, then you can have that second host deliver mail properly *and* have it still do your "fancy task". Note that if you're going to try to direct all mail based on subject, things are going to be really confusing. I'd *strongly* suggest doing it based on destination address, if you have any control over it and a desire to keep your sanity.Thanks for the follow-up question Matt.
Certain systems will send mail to customers, and their responses to
predetermined mailboxes will be parsed for further action or read by humans
in some cases.
Another system which can only speak SMTP will send messages with distinct subject fields. I will need to hand off incoming mail which matches an array of subject fields to a home-brew application which parses, talks to a database, fires off some jobs, and finally responds with another email.
I know its ugly. Its not my choice. If I could do JMS I would. SMTP is
what I'm stuck with.
This is obviously asynchronous, but I can only afford minutes - not hours of
delay, which is why MX weighting is not a practical solution for me.
Perhaps Aaron J's suggestion of putting all my eggs in one REALLY good
basket is the right move, but I'm hoping for something better. I know I
could get the access behavior I want out of LVS, but I'm not sure how to get
the data shared by both MTAs without a headache should hardware fail. That
is, unless I add a separate storage subsystem, which brings me back to my
original post.
If on the other hand your task can only be completed by one machine, for concurrency / storage / whatever reasons, or what-have-you, then you're back to my previous suggestion.
Aaron S. Joyner
PS - Also note that it's entirely possible to do not only fail over, but load balancing with MX trickery. You can have more than one MX with the same priority, and traffic will be equally divided between them. If your application needs to scale, and can be processed by multiple machines, that's the way to go about it.
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