Anyone aware of a particularly good discussion of building a farm of
vpopmail "compliant" front-end machines for user access to a central
file server via NFS on linux? I'm concerned that I haven't thought
through issues in how to properly account for webmail/IMAP, MySQL for
storing smtp-auth IPs for relay control, and a few other topics.
Googling hasn't yielded much but a few threads from the *BSD folks.
My tentative thinking is 2+ front end machines that draw from a
common/identical configuration that provide the client interfaces via:
- SMTPd, smtp-auth, pop3d, send, IMAPd, anti-virus, anti-spam, webmail
(apache + squirrelmail)
- CHKUSER talking to the backend server
- Local /var/qmail/ (typical) install for queue, bin, supervise,
etc... possibly taken from the central, backend server via nightly
rsync where needed.
- NFS client communication to the central backend server
A single, large server provides the "backend" services to these machines
for:
- MySQL server (for smtp-auth tracking, squirrelmail prefs/abook/sigs,
users, domains)
- NFS Service providing Client-mounted folder(s) for the domains' email.
Any special compile/configuration suggestions to support this that I
wouldn't normally use on a single-box solution? Should the client
machines be logging to their local drives, to an NFS mounted drive, or
log over the network (like syslog-ng, even possible with multilog???) to
any particular host?
Any administrative issues that grow through this distributed model? I'm
thinking about whether vqadmin or qmailadmin will continue to function
correctly when run from any of the "farm" machines? Would I just allow
one "admin" machine for vqadmin/qmailadmin to prevent issues?
Any risks of data collision/overlap or other issues that might surface
with this multi-server model? Central MySQL should solve most of this,
right?
THANKS!!!!!
D.
