Date: Tue, 11 Aug 1998 11:20:44 +0200 From: Andre Oppermann <oppermann@pipeline.ch> To: Gary Palmer <gpalmer@FreeBSD.ORG> Cc: GVB <gvb@tns.net>, freebsd-net@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Mail server... Message-ID: <35D00CEC.235D6171@pipeline.ch> References: <4827.902734360@gjp.erols.com>
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Gary Palmer wrote: > > Andre Oppermann wrote in message ID > <35C89E8F.EB696A97@pipeline.ch>: > > I would suggest something like this: > > > 1x NetApp Filer for maildir storage (does RAID5 and backup) > > Incorrect. It does RAID 4, and in software. That, coupled with the fact that > NFS over 1500 byte ethernet is not the best of ideas makes me wonder why you > recommended it. Yes, it will work. It may even scale a bit. But it is far from I recommend it because it is an available 'off the shelf solution'. > an optimal solution. (if you did NFS over CDDI or FDDI it would work a bit > better as you wouldn't need to scale the NFS read/write sizes down to avoid > fragmentation) > > There are a number of other solutions, varying in technical skill required, > which use unix machines as message stores and then use lower-powered machines > infront of the message stores to direct inbound traffic. This way you can have > multiple pop servers, and the users are directed transparently to the one > which holds their mail without their changing anything. > > You can either do this simply (a POP3 proxy isn't that difficult), or you can > go wild and write your own communications protocol to fetch & store messages > on the stores, and have the customer-facing machines do more work. Shure, just write your own communication protocol. I thought the questioner is not so high skilled to write his own comm protocol. > This scenario works ... we currently have 400k+ users in the proxied pop > environment, with over 30k of them being online at any one time and checking > their mail. We see (typically) 600-700 concurrent POP3 sessions. However, it > does require a programmer to set up this way ... the NFS version works for > anyone, but I (personally) wouldn't like to scale it up. I depends on how far you have to scale up and what you have to scale up, number of users or size of storage? BTW: Can you give me a little bit more information on your mail server setup and the protocol you wrote? > > > also appriciated. Also, does FreeBSD take advantage of dual processers? Is > > > FreeBSD won't take advantage of two processors until release 3.0 which > > due in october. > > And I wouldn't recommend SMP for a production environment unless you know what > you are doing... Heavily I/O bound machines will not benefit because of the > way the kernel is using locks. Yup. -- Andre Oppermann CEO / Geschaeftsfuehrer Internet Business Solutions Ltd. (AG) Hardstrasse 235, 8005 Zurich, Switzerland Fon +41 1 277 75 75 / Fax +41 1 277 75 77 http://www.pipeline.ch ibs@pipeline.ch To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-net" in the body of the message
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