From owner-freebsd-isp Tue Oct 6 17:09:26 1998 Return-Path: Received: (from majordom@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) id RAA05483 for freebsd-isp-outgoing; Tue, 6 Oct 1998 17:09:26 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from owner-freebsd-isp@FreeBSD.ORG) Received: from hera.webcom.com (hera.webcom.com [209.1.28.42]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id RAA05410 for ; Tue, 6 Oct 1998 17:08:49 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from u@webcom.com) Received: from kigal.webcom.com (kigal.webcom.com [209.1.28.57]) by hera.webcom.com (8.9.1/8.9.1) with SMTP id AAA26324; Wed, 7 Oct 1998 00:08:39 -0700 Received: from [199.183.207.110] by inanna.webcom.com (WebCom SMTP 1.2.1) with SMTP id 4378868; Tue Oct 06 17:07 PDT 1998 Message-Id: <361ADA58.58B7@webcom.com> Date: Tue, 06 Oct 1998 20:04:56 -0700 From: Graeme Tait Organization: Echidna X-Mailer: Mozilla 2.02 (Win16; I) Mime-Version: 1.0 To: "Jeffrey J. Mountin" Cc: freebsd-isp@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: How to share accounts between mail/pop and web servers? References: <87hfxiv0r9.fsf@absinthe.shenton.org> <3.0.3.32.19981006180534.00f762c4@207.227.119.2> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-isp@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Jeffrey J. Mountin wrote: [format auto-recovered by secretary.echidna.com] > At 08:53 AM 10/6/98 -0700, Graeme Tait wrote: > >Chris Shenton wrote: > >> > >> I plan to split into two boxes: one for WWW and FTP, the other for > >> SMTP, POP, and IMAP. Not sure where I'm gonna run RADIUS yet, maybe > >> on both for redundancy. > > > > > >May I ask maybe a dumb question, as I am involved as a newbie in setting > >up our own server much like the above (except for dialup), and hope some > >day to have this problem ;-) > > > >Why not duplicate the box and split the users across boxes? That way if > >one box goes down, only half your users suffer. It's scalable, as for > >yet more users you just add another box, and you can load-balance the > >boxes easily for good utilization by allocating users appropriately. > >Configuration is the same from box to box, and having hardware spares is > >easy. The only thing that might connect the boxes is having them do > >secondary DNS for each other. > > This creates overhead in administrating the users. Load balancing implies that you > are mirroring and then the thorny issue of how to mirror comes up. Some day there > will be a good solution for this like Novell's, which mirrors in real time over a > private fibre connection. By "load balancing" I simply meant that if box A had more load than box B, you would allocate the next new user to box B (or move users if necessary). > It's better to break out services to various servers, so that only one service may be > down for the customer. If it's fixed quickly, they usually don't mind, but when > "everything" is down for them. I can see it cutting both ways. If you had say 5 boxes in my model and one went down, 20% of users are affected. If all there email was on one box in the alternate model, 100% of email is down. The model I suggested seems to be that successfully used by pair.com (running FreeBSD, of course). Another advantage of essentially identical boxes is that upgrades can be tested on a subset of the system before total commitment. > Jeff Mountin - Unix Systems TCP/IP networking > jeff@mountin.net -- Graeme Tait - Echidna To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-isp" in the body of the message