Date: Fri, 13 Mar 1998 17:06:10 +0000 From: Alan Judge <Alan.Judge@indigo.ie> To: freebsd-isp@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Scalable mail server Message-ID: <199803131706.JAA27619@hub.freebsd.org> In-Reply-To: Message from Neil Levine dated today at 13:14.
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Neil> Perosnally, I am more interested in ways of making the mail server Neil> scalable by having distributed data. If all the Maildirs are stored Neil> on the one NetApp it is not exactly an infinitly scalable solution. What Neil> would be nice is a simple(!) way of spreading the mailboxes between Neil> multiple machines with say a couple of customer facing machines Neil> handling incoming port 25 and 110 connections. That way you can have Neil> users a-e on one box f-l, on another etc, the customer facing machine Neil> then needs a way of knowing what is where. Using /etc/passwd is a no Neil> go area. SQL based or Radius based user verification is essential Neil> nowdays for large servers. The system we use can easily be scaled to multiple filers. Since Maildirs go in customer home directories (or anywhere else you like, but not one big spool), you can control where these go as you like. We already hash the directories used into 100s of directories based on unique IDs, so I could move these to lots of different filers if I liked, which seems to be what you want. Effectively, this is using the customer directory and the mount table as a lookup table to select the backend, or you could use replicated directories full of symlinks, allowing you to change the mapping quickly if there is a failure. I can't see any way of making it much simpler. Using /etc/passwd works fine for us and should continue working until 100K+. We are looking at SQL solutions and the passwd database is, of course, built from a database. You can't beat it for speed. It doesn't really effect the scaling issue though. You need some way of finding where the mail is, you can use /etc/passwd, hashing based on user name/uid, SQL, Radius, or whatever. -- Alan Judge Phone: +353-1-6046901 Indigo Internet Services Fax: +353-1-6046948 To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-isp" in the body of the message
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