Date: Tue, 11 Aug 1998 16:38:12 -0400 From: "Gary Palmer" <gpalmer@FreeBSD.ORG> To: Andre Oppermann <oppermann@pipeline.ch> Cc: GVB <gvb@tns.net>, freebsd-net@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Mail server... Message-ID: <10099.902867892@gjp.erols.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Tue, 11 Aug 1998 11:20:44 %2B0200." <35D00CEC.235D6171@pipeline.ch>
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Andre Oppermann wrote in message ID <35D00CEC.235D6171@pipeline.ch>: > > You can either do this simply (a POP3 proxy isn't that difficult), or > Shure, just write your own communication protocol. I thought the > questioner is not so high skilled to write his own comm protocol. If you note in the above quote, I said ``POP3 proxy''. I haven't ever written my own backend storage/retrieval protocol, although I have a few ideas rumbling around in my head for when I get enough time to sit down and write a large piece of software. The most difficult part of the software wouldn't be the backend protocol, but rather conforming to the RFC's and all the broken client communication software. Doing message storage and retrieval over a LAN is almost easy by comparison :) I have no idea of the skill-level of the person who posted the original question, which is why said that my solutions needed varying degrees of skill depending on what you wanted to do. > I depends on how far you have to scale up and what you have to scale up, > number of users or size of storage? Number of users is always the goal. Their storage can be quota'd easily to make storage scalability a secondary requirement of having more users. Of course, depending on what you want to support, you may not need more storage, but more spindles. That, however, is a totally different discussion. The way we handled storage at work was to use large *hardware* based RAID-5 arrays. The Symbios controllers are really neat, and in our benchmarks about the fastest SCSI RAID units available for unix machines right now. > BTW: Can you give me a little bit more information on your mail server > setup and the protocol you wrote? We just (as bjc already said) proxied the users POP3 sessions so that the multiple message stores were transparent to the user. The `aliases' functionality which is in all production MTA's (sendmail, exim, qmail, vmailer, etc) handles the SMTP `proxying' rather nicely, although not as efficiently as I'd like. There are a lot of tricks you can pull to make the MTA proxying more efficient. We didn't have the human-time to re-write the MTA's so we threw more horsepower at the backend storage machines. Hardware is cheap and easier to find than skilled programmers :) Gary -- Gary Palmer FreeBSD Core Team Member FreeBSD: Turning PC's into workstations. See http://www.FreeBSD.ORG/ for info To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-net" in the body of the message
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