> My understanding is that Cyrus IMAPD itself is designed as a central
> mailboxes (a special kind of files, in a way) server.
Yes.
> So it makes little sense to put the mailboxes themselves on a different
The only place I think it might make sense is on cheap large scale
servers. In particular, some of the NAS devices have their own advanced
filesystems, (I forget which one I'm thinking of), which show much
better performance for large numbers of small files than UFS normally
does. So my architecture would be something like NAS box(es) backend,
Multiple cheap linux boxes, plenty of memory/cpu, bugger all disk on the
front end. It's only a theoritcal excersice anyway, in response to some
of the other questions asked. There's also situations where you have a
pure fileserver box, not a lot of memory but lots of disk, and you'd
like to use a second machine with plenty of memory as the imap server...
In reality, I'd be more likely to put together a cheapish linux box,
with reiserfs and a couple of external raid boxes.
I guess my real question was, does SMB suffer the same kind of remote
locking issues that NFS does? It was probably better directed at the
samba-tech mailing list.
> (central) server. Having a NFS server re-exporting a SMB-mounted FS
> is quite a nonsense... (unless you're really forced to do so, but be also
> prepared to pay a price in performance and functionality). Think of IMAP
Wouldn't dream of it. Actually I've done similar things in labs, but
only for entertainment... NetBSD on a Mac LCIII, NFS to Linux box, NCP
(netware) back out to a MacOS client. On 10mb shared hubs. Why? Because
75Kps is funny. :-)
> just like another network file service. Building it on top of other one
> is bad practice.
Generally I agree. Simplicity is both astheticly pleasing, and easier to
maintain.
> See also:
> http://asg.web.cmu.edu/cyrus/ag.html
> (I can't find a way to reach this document from http://asg.web.cmu.edu/cyrus,
> but there's a link in the doc directory of the source distribution).
Yeah, I've seen it. One of these days I'll look at it too, but we really
don't have a requirement for it. My userbase is spread thinly accross
the planet, with several small-medium servers handling individual sites.
I am intersted to see how well I can use the aggregator to give a
unified IMAP namespace, particularly for shared folders, and especially
accross (slow) WANS. I'd like my users in the UK to be able to see the
same shared hierachies as the US ones, without showing them multiple
servers. I don't think the current aggregator model suits that, it's
really just a load balancer.
--
-=*=-=*=--=*=-=*=-=*=-
Tristan Ball
System Administrator
Vision Systems
ph 03 9211 7064
-=*=-=*=--=*=-=*=-=*=-
