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-----Original Message-----
From: Len Conrad [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Tuesday, April 18, 2000 12:25 AM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: [IMail Forum] iMail & Server Load Balancing.
Dave,
>I was curious if anyone has setup iMail to work as a "Load Balancing"
>service across multiple servers?
I just put up a few pages of text this weekend to accompany the diagrams on
my "Imail Gate" site: http://IMGate.Imail.com.
The page on "dual gateways" plus various mentions on the other pages
addresses the issues of mail infrastructure ...
1. robustness through redandancy of MTA's
2. load sharing of incoming mail,
3. separately, load sharing of outgoing mail for both indiviual mail
traffic and volume mailing list outgoing traffic.
4. off-loading of machine-machine SMTP traffic ("plumbing")from Imail to
IMGate, to free Imail for machine-user tasks (POP3, IMAP, receving SMTP
AUTH incoming mail, Web Messaging).
5. and of course, the original motivation behind IMGate, that of protecting
the total mail sytem Mail-Abuse.org's anti-spam databases, and various DNS
record validations.
I often help people with screwed up DNS's, to see the DNSExpert's finds
nearly all of them running zone's with only one MX. There really isn't any
justification for this, for any but the tinyiest, low-mail-volume toy sites.
Commercially, an ISP just isn't being serious and competitive if he's not
offering mail service reliability through MTA redudancy. Ideally,
secondary MX's are off-site and off-backbone.
>I would sincerely apprecitate any pointers to any applications and/or Cisco
>router setups you could offer. This is one of the "must-have" requirements
>our campus has dictated in a new mail system. I know exchange and notes
can
>do this, and feel there must be a way to make iMail do the same.
Imail 6 doesn't have any of these features, that's why I've complemented
Imail with IMGate, while retaining Imail at the heart of my mail system,
esp the parts that interact with my clients.
For incoming mail, DNS MX records and MTA behaviour with MX records already
offer sufficient reliability for delivering mail when primary MTA is
unreachable. SMTP and DNS are sufficiently fail-over.
For outgoing mail redundancy, Imail is a little rigid in the failover area,
but I've asked Ipswitch to make a small change in the
SMTP:SendAllMailThroughGateway, so that we can enter more than on
ip.ad.re.ss and have Imail step through them in primary, secondary, etc MX
fashion.
A key, and very old but little-heeded, msg is that the solution is not
throwing bigger and bigger single machines at the situation, but using
several smaller machines each concentrating of specific tasks.
An MTA in an P200 with 64 megs of RAM can handle tons of mail traffic in a
24 hour period.
Ipswitch desparately needs to upgrade the ODBC driver for heavy
multi-threading and SQL7, but Mike Nice's replacment is workable patch for
now. I think there might be interest in having Imail support other
authentification databases such as radius and (external) LDAP servers.
Len
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