Thanks so much for your reply. Further thoughts/questions inline below:
> > Since I have not been able to tackle the excessive CPU usage of spamd
> on a
> > single machine (see the thread "spamd still burning CPU in 3.0.1"), I am
> > hoping that the people who said I am simply maxing out spamd's
> capabilities
> > are right: I am moving to a multiple box solution. I will be putting a
> > machine online that will likely do little else than run spamd. I may or
> may
> > not continue to run a couple spamd children on the original machine, just
> to
> > help out. I have two questions:
> >
> > 1) Is it a waste of a whole machine to just run spamd? I suppose I
> will be
> > watching its resource usage, but am wondering if it will be available to
> be
> > used as a MySQL server and/or something like NFS.
> >
> > 2) I am clueless about how to serve spamd in more than one place. How
> do I
> > tell spamc that I have more than one spamd listening for requests in more
> > than one place? Also, one spamd will be running a lot more children and
> will
> > thus take more requests -- do I somehow (how???) need to load balance or
> will
> > it happen "automatically" by simply seeing that one of my machines' spamd
> > currently has no available children? Uhhhh, I am lost here. Anyone know
> of
> > any good reading I can do? Links? Tips? How-to's?
> >
> > Reading man spamc, I see:
> >
> > -d host In TCP/IP mode, connect to spamd server on given host (default:
> > localhost).
> >
> > If host resolves to multiple addresses, then spamc will
> fail-over
> > to
> > the other addresses, if the first one cannot be connected to.
> >
> > So do I just do this:
> >
> > /usr/bin/spamc -u <username> -d 127.0.0.1 123.45.6.789
> >
> > Again, is load balancing going to be an issue with this configuration?
> > Remember, one of these addresses will be underpowered compared to the
> other.
> >
> > Ah, then this:
> >
> > -H For TCP/IP sockets, randomize the IP addresses returned from a DNS
> > name lookup (when more than one IP is returned). This provides for a
> > kind of hostname-base load balancing.
> >
> > I am not sure how to use this one, but it looks a little more like what I
> > want. Can anyone offer pointers on how to implement this?
>
> Hi,
>
> You are darn close there... What you want is
>
> /usr/bin/spamc -u <username> -d spa.yourdomain.com -H
>
> And spa.yourdomain.com has two ptr records, one to 127.0.0.1 and the
> other to 123.45.6.789
>
> in Bind talk that would be
>
> spa.yourdomain.com. IN A 127.0.0.1
> spa.yourdomain.com. IN A 123.45.6.789
>
> and in tinydns
>
> +spa.yourdomain.com:127.0.0.1:3600
> +spa.yourdomain.com:123.45.6.789:3600
>
> I'm not sure if you really need the -H, I know I don't using dnscache as
> my local dns server.
Why? Does dnscache randomize for you?
> To do true load balancing you need a hardware or software load balancer
> running, linux will do it if you ever need/want to get into that.
Ideally, I'd not like to have to take that up just yet. ;)
> I haven't tested using a -d 127.0.0.1,123.45.6.789 to see if spamc will
> fail over to the second host if all the connections are busy on the
> first host. I could be wrong but I don't think it will fail over to the
> second host because the first host will just place it in the queue to be
> processed. I could very well be wrong though.
But using the DNS-based approach as you do, it *will* fail over? Why? It
seems like if spamd tries to queue up any request it gets, then it would
happen to you, too. Spamd should not have any way of knowing if you used DNS
to resolve it or the addresses were listed on the command line, no?
Thanks!
__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Check out the new Yahoo! Front Page.
www.yahoo.com
