On Wed, May 02, 2001 at 11:42:24AM +0800, Jeffrey Iskandar Ahmad wrote:
> Hi,
> Im the mail server administrator for one of Malaysia ISP. I would like to
> propose qmail system to my management replacing our existing expensive mail
> servers. Can you assist me on what is the best set up/ solution for the mail
> servers on the software side? we going to have 4 sun high end servers and 1
> terabyte external storages. Please reply and I'll give more information.
>
> Tq in advance.
Let me guess that you run Netscape Messenger at the moment? I've been
involved with a number of Netscape Messenger to qmail conversions for
ISPs.
To good news is that converting to qmail will not require extra
hardware, quite the reverse. The bad news is that your biggest deal
will be converting the existing Messenger mailboxes to qmail. It's not
hard - a little perl will do the trick, but a terabyte of mailbox
takes a long time to convert, that is, many many hours. Of course you
also need a spare terabyte of disk for the converted mailboxes. Have
you got that on your (let me guess - Netapp)?
Also you need to very carefully construct a transition plan. Draining
of the existing queue, mailbox availability during conversion. Virtual
domains, that sort of thing. Typically ISPs like such transitions to
be transparent. This can be done with care, but think long and hard
first.
You haven't explained anything at all about your current setup so it's
hard to make other suggestions, but you'll want to consider splitting
your servers up into different roles. The roles to consider are:
o SMTP servers that are MXed in your DNS
o SMTP servers that are used internally by your customers
o POP servers that are used by your customers
A given box can of course server multiple purposes.
Regards.
