Gabriel
Their reference to being NFS safe is to the fact that they use Maildirs
instead of a one big Mailbox which was been the Unix standard for a long
time. Vpopmail doesn't add Maildir support, it comes with Qmail and is
recommend by the Qmail install. The authors of Vpopmail just made the
logical choose to use Maildirs in their implementation.
The reason the mailbox format does not work reliably across an NFS share is
because it is one big file that is constantly being written to as the user
reads and deletes mail and more comes in. Across an NFS share this causes a
problem because it is hard to prevent the file from becoming corrupted.
Since Maildirs contain one file for each new message you do not have to
worry about the file possibly becoming corrupted as new mail comes in while
a remote user is editting their mailbox contents. Also if the a file becomes
corrupted it only contains one message not 100's.
If you use Maildir format instead of a mailbox it does not matter whether
you are running vpopmail or some other program, it is the mail delivery
structure of your MTA that makes it viable over NFS not vpopmail. Don't get
me wrong, I am not putting down vpopmail. I use it and it is great. Inter7
has some excellent addons to Qmail.
As for single point of failure. NFS is not distributed so if the machine
that has the mail directories goes down it is still a single point of
failure. You could get around this by using a raid array that can be
accessed by multiple systems so if one goes down the other can still access
your raid.
Mark
----- Original Message -----
From: "Gabriel Ambuehl" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "Eduardo Augusto Alvarenga" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Cc: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Saturday, May 05, 2001 10:06 AM
Subject: Re[2]: POP3 Cluster
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hello Eduardo,
Saturday, May 05, 2001, 5:28:34 PM, you wrote:
> I don't think using NFS should be a good solution for clustering
since
> Qmail *needs* to have all files on the same local disk.
> I don't know about vpopmail, could it be used under a NFS site
> securelly?
inter7.com/vpopmail:
"- NFS safe, dynamic user mailbox directory creation for 10 to 10
million users using a "fill in ballenced 3 level tree"."
Do you guys even read what you download?
Best regards,
Gabriel
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: PGP 6.0.2i
iQEVAwUBOvQlFMZa2WpymlDxAQF6Zwf6Az7QVE0omQeXNZthP9VZn23wEYwqcN1c
T97k5lo57Notokv94ETjjNdeiDNT9x47Uk2tM459Rz/5S9DVUvqtoGqodYiPQUnN
Au4xHjB4EB62ySpaYekqWecjMuosibNyS224ElmwA+ZEEEuLm0BXOWQ+JrH1hbkv
Ma8y9rBGsTjk7lknmvRMnUODtcia8RcaV9v1rCZJ0BFsdJ/hdJbx9N56WZRegOIr
aERzreQIxOXzii9/lsgl/9jzZuh3YA4rozGKfyxUzl5k/WGRCXeFyEdNr9Mq9298
QB00CRGaHdzGPFjv2Wpk9hTOpmPJhnonbb64Bx7EVhTp4gENC2okCQ==
=ToW9
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
