Date: Wed, 01 Feb 2006 11:10:08 -0500 From: Chuck Swiger <cswiger@mac.com> To: Lisa Casey <lisa@jellico.com> Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Getting a new server Message-ID: <43E0DD60.8060208@mac.com> In-Reply-To: <014001c62743$f11bf070$d51a2cd0@lisac> References: <014001c62743$f11bf070$d51a2cd0@lisac>
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Lisa Casey wrote: > My company (a medium sized ISP) has decided to replace one of our mail > servers. We need more CPU power, memory, etc. My boss is talking about > getting 2 good size hard drives with a raid card to mirror these. I was > planning to install FreeBSD 5.3 (because that's the latest distro I have > CD's for) unless anyone has a good reason why not. 5.4 is out, but you can easily install from your FreeBSD 5.3 CD's and upgrade. 6.0 is also worth taking a look at, if you have time to test it and make sure it works with the software you want to run. Most people are wise to be cautious about adopting a .0 release, but 6.0 is solid. > I'll be installing Sendmail, mimedefang/spamassassin (somewhat CPU > intensive), bind (for a caching name server), Qpopper, procmail. We > currently have 500 - 600 mail accounts on the current server, and plan > to move these to the new server plus use the new one for growth (I don't > know how quickly new mail accounts will be added, but say 20 to 50 > accounts per month. > > What would you folks reccomend as far as hardware goes? Hard drive size, > CPU type, amount of RAM, etc.? If you're buying new hardware, pretty much anything has enough CPU to handle the reader side; the spamfiltering and virus scanning will be more CPU-intensive. Dual-3GHz Xeon's with 2GB of RAM? Your normal candidates, Dell, HP, IBM, all have reasonably similar models (PowerEdge 28x0, HP DL370/380, etc) which will do just fine for this sort of thing. If at all possible, it would be nice to seperate your MX box which does SMTP, virus scanning, and spam-filtering, and have another machine which is a reader box which runs your IMAP/POP daemons and has the filestorage to handle your mailboxes. As to storage: 100 MB per user * 1000 users == 100 GB of space If you want to give your users more room, buy more disk, but you should be looking into RAID-1 or RAID-10 configuration, preferably also using maildir rather than mbox style mailboxes. -- -Chuck
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