In regard to: Re: [Imap-uw] Don't want a unix user per account - is there...:
Mark Crispin wrote:
For what it's worth, the University of Washington has a six-digit user
community for its IMAP service, and many of these users thousands if not
tens of thousands of messages in their mailboxes.
I am curious why you feel that it "doesn't seem scalable".
The scalability issue comes in as:
1. Authentication takes much longer if you are at the end of a very very long
password flat file (ie. 10,000+ and 100,000+ account entries)
Most UNIX platforms have supported database-backed password files for
years. Linux is no exception. Do some searching for libnss_db for more
info for Linux.
Recent versions of most commercial UNIXes and Linux also can exceed the
2^16-1 barrier for uids, so it's certainly possible to have more than
65,535 passwd file entries on one host.
2. Updates to password files take much longer when they are very large
(if you are re-building them from a database for example).
That's odd. I've never noticed that phenomenon, and we had systems even
10 years ago that had 35,000+ accounts on them. Most of our systems
these days are single-purpose, and don't have more than 4-5K accounts
on them.
Other scalability issues come in with pam-listfiles if you have very large
numbers of users and a significant fraction of them are barred from certain
services (i.e. IMAP). It would be nice if there were a pam-listfile utility
that used compiled file-databases like sendmail does.
I'm not familiar with pam-listfiles, but I agree that things can get
complicated (and that often means slower) with PAM stacking.
Tim
--
Tim Mooney [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Information Technology Services (701) 231-1076 (Voice)
Room 242-J6, IACC Building (701) 231-8541 (Fax)
North Dakota State University, Fargo, ND 58105-5164
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