On Mon, 17 Jan 2000, Brian Baquiran wrote:
> Hi,
> We're setting up a big Qmail installation. It is projected that the number of
> users will be in the hundreds of thousands within a couple of months.
>
> Our current idea is to have one big NFS server, and a lot of lightweight
> SMTP/POP3 servers that mount their /var/qmail/ and /home/vpopmail from the NFS
> server. Is this OK? How should I go about this?
it will work, and others have given you ideas about how to scale using
NFS. Here is an Idea...
IDEA:
=====
Assuming a file of the form:
mailname password server location
ais007 xxxxxxxx metis /mail/ai/s/ais007/
air007 yyyyyyyy thebe /mail/ai/r/air007/
DNS:
mail IN A metis-ip-address
IN A thebe-ip-address
If one connect to 'mail' and authenticates then checkpassword reads ones
entry above and instead of starting up the qmail-pop3d connects to the
remote machine, passes the authentication authentication information over
to the remote machine and starts a tcp-relay process to connect the client
machine with the system with the real mail on.
example:
ais007/xxxxxxxx connects to mail[thebe]
thebe validates login information and notices ais007 is on metis
thebe connects to the pop-server on metis and passes ais007/xxxxx
if connection fails return a suitable error message to user
if connection suceeds start a tcp-relay process
metis validates login information and starts qmail-pop3d
user collects mail over a reliable transport.
Optimisations, scaling:
=======================
1/ The front-end machines don't actually have to store mail on them:
mail IN A client1-ip-address
IN A client2-ip-address
So they always connect to a remote qmail-pop3d server. as client load
increases add more front-end machines.
2/ one tracks client's preferences for mail servers and moves mail to that
server
notes: I've not tried this in practice but it should work. I accidentally
sent this text to Russel Nelson who told me this was essentially what the
qmail-ldap patch did, so you might like to look at that.
RjL
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