Thanks to both of you for for input here.

It is s single instance, I'll need to check if it's init scripts are fully
LSB compliant - lots of resources out there I see.

It's running Dovecote and uses maildir so Dimitri your solution is
attractive.

> If you are delivering to ~/Maildir's and don't have mailing lists, it
> should work.
>
No mailing lists set up - all mail outs to customers are generated by php
scripts on a web server and passed to the mail server for delivery.  What
specifically need I look out for here?

Do you have any suggestions on some reading for how this works Dimitri?
How does a set up like this ensure the data is the same on both machines
without something like DRDB in place?  It would seem I need to learn a great
deal more about Dovecot/IMAP/Maildir.

It seems I have opened quite a can of worms here.   Could it really be as
simple as deploying a second host from a snapshot and setting up the new
interfaces?  I must be missing something key here.

regards

Paul

On Wed, Oct 19, 2011 at 11:31 AM, Dimitri Maziuk <[email protected]>wrote:

> On 10/19/2011 11:00 AM, Paul O'Rorke wrote:
> > after thinking this through and doing a little reading it occurs to me
> that
> > this will only help cache incomming mail until the primary MX mail server
> is
> > back up.  What I want is servers mirrored in realtime, with failover.  I
> > would have expected HA-Linux to be a good candidate for that.
>
> No, you can run the 2nd MX with the same priority and same config as the
> 1st one. Its intended use is load balancing, but as a side effect, if
> one MX goes down the other gets all the mail.
>
> The problem is shared resources: mbox'es in /var/spool/mail or MLM
> software.
>
> If you are delivering to ~/Maildir's and don't have mailing lists, it
> should work.
>
> (If you're delivering to mbox'es in /var/spool/mail, don't. Consider
> switching to maildirs as part of the upgrade.)
>
> If you insist on mbox'es you'll need drbd for mail spool and list
> archives (if any) and probably also for config files to make your life
> easier -- pretty much what Florian said. What he didn't say is it'll
> take you a week of frustration to get a working configuration.
>
> The other thing he didn't say is that when you put those files/dirs on
> drbd filesystem, you typically make symlinks from their original
> location: e.g. /var/spool/mail->/drbd/mailspool. When drbd filesystem is
> not mounted (on the passive node), all of them are broken symlinks. I
> don't know about dpkg, but rpm does "fix" those whenever you update the
> relevant packages. So you have to remember to triple-check and re-create
> those broken symlinks after every software update on the passive node.
>
> --
> Dimitri Maziuk
> Programmer/sysadmin
> BioMagResBank, UW-Madison -- http://www.bmrb.wisc.edu
>
>
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