Re: Mail server
Hello, Am 19:16 2003-02-24 +0100 hat Russell Coker geschrieben: > >On Mon, 24 Feb 2003 18:34, Colin Ellis wrote: >The fastest drives (15000rpm) will take an average of 4ms for the disk to spin >to the correct location to start a transfer in addition to the seek times for >moving the heads. That gives a performance of something less than 100 IO >operations per second per disk. I am working on a bunch of Dell PowerEdge >2650 machines with 4*U160 15000rpm SCSI disks in a hardware RAID-5 with a >battery backed write-back cache. This gives a peak performance of about 130 >disk writes per second. Last year I have gotten a Athlon MP 1900 with an IPC-Vortex Raid-5 and three IBM 146 GByte (U320/1). I have tested it with postgresql and with a smpt/pop3 Server. I have made a stresstest by seting up 50 users and subscribed all to more then 40 debian-* Mailinglist... Traffic enough !!! The server has handled more then 220 Mails/second unfortunately I was not able to test in the same time user accesses with pop. OK, for you a little Bbit overkil like for me... I think, I will handle only 500-800 Users with normal traffic which mean, around 10-20 mails a day. Traffic which can handled by a Duron 900MHz, 256 MB and a RAID-5 Array of 3 x IBM 18 GByte (U320/1) on an IPC-Vortex. My Dual-Athlon will be the central nfs-Server of my Cyber-Center/ Internet-Cafe in Strasbourg, where users have 100 MByte Diskspace, Which can used for private files, ~/public_html, ~/mail and ftpspace inside of ~/public_html. in plus it serves Webmail, pop3, asmtp and suports 30-40 Workstations with nfs inside my Cyber-Center. I have used Webmin but it does not what I need and now I use my own php4 Scripts to manage the users... I think, there is no problem with the traffic. Oh yes, if I run public, I will use 4 + 1 Harddisk. Greetings from Strasbourg Michelle
Re: Mail server
Hello, Am 19:16 2003-02-24 +0100 hat Russell Coker geschrieben: > >On Mon, 24 Feb 2003 18:34, Colin Ellis wrote: >The fastest drives (15000rpm) will take an average of 4ms for the disk to spin >to the correct location to start a transfer in addition to the seek times for >moving the heads. That gives a performance of something less than 100 IO >operations per second per disk. I am working on a bunch of Dell PowerEdge >2650 machines with 4*U160 15000rpm SCSI disks in a hardware RAID-5 with a >battery backed write-back cache. This gives a peak performance of about 130 >disk writes per second. Last year I have gotten a Athlon MP 1900 with an IPC-Vortex Raid-5 and three IBM 146 GByte (U320/1). I have tested it with postgresql and with a smpt/pop3 Server. I have made a stresstest by seting up 50 users and subscribed all to more then 40 debian-* Mailinglist... Traffic enough !!! The server has handled more then 220 Mails/second unfortunately I was not able to test in the same time user accesses with pop. OK, for you a little Bbit overkil like for me... I think, I will handle only 500-800 Users with normal traffic which mean, around 10-20 mails a day. Traffic which can handled by a Duron 900MHz, 256 MB and a RAID-5 Array of 3 x IBM 18 GByte (U320/1) on an IPC-Vortex. My Dual-Athlon will be the central nfs-Server of my Cyber-Center/ Internet-Cafe in Strasbourg, where users have 100 MByte Diskspace, Which can used for private files, ~/public_html, ~/mail and ftpspace inside of ~/public_html. in plus it serves Webmail, pop3, asmtp and suports 30-40 Workstations with nfs inside my Cyber-Center. I have used Webmin but it does not what I need and now I use my own php4 Scripts to manage the users... I think, there is no problem with the traffic. Oh yes, if I run public, I will use 4 + 1 Harddisk. Greetings from Strasbourg Michelle -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
RE: Mail Server Authentication
Gentlemen - Sorry if I'm stepping into the middle of your conversation but I just finished installing cyrus-imap, postfix, & procmail. It is working - by the way. The article that I used to help me was in LinuxWorld. You can find the original article at www.linuxworld.com. In the first screen, enter IMAP in the search field. Currently, I am using passwd for my authentication but the last section of the article had some info that might be of help to you. Specifically, I would like to put ldap on my system. But that is another project for another day. Greg -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, March 05, 2003 4:39 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; debian-isp@lists.debian.org Subject: Re: Mail Server Authentication Hi Teun, had a look at the link Postfix is compiled with SASL, and Cyrus with SASL2 I dont want to use 2 'db' files to store the same usernames and passwords, and as I said, I dont want them in Mysql or /etc/passwd - hmmm... was hoping to find a package that I wouldnt have to maintain myself... On Fri, Feb 28, 2003 at 11:40:02PM +0100, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > http://people.debian.org/~hmh/ has a complete set of cyrus and postfix > packages backported from sid to woody. I use them on one of my personal Cheers Andrew -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
RE: Mail Server Authentication
Gentlemen - Sorry if I'm stepping into the middle of your conversation but I just finished installing cyrus-imap, postfix, & procmail. It is working - by the way. The article that I used to help me was in LinuxWorld. You can find the original article at www.linuxworld.com. In the first screen, enter IMAP in the search field. Currently, I am using passwd for my authentication but the last section of the article had some info that might be of help to you. Specifically, I would like to put ldap on my system. But that is another project for another day. Greg -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, March 05, 2003 4:39 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Mail Server Authentication Hi Teun, had a look at the link Postfix is compiled with SASL, and Cyrus with SASL2 I dont want to use 2 'db' files to store the same usernames and passwords, and as I said, I dont want them in Mysql or /etc/passwd - hmmm... was hoping to find a package that I wouldnt have to maintain myself... On Fri, Feb 28, 2003 at 11:40:02PM +0100, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > http://people.debian.org/~hmh/ has a complete set of cyrus and postfix > packages backported from sid to woody. I use them on one of my personal Cheers Andrew -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Mail Server Authentication
Hi Teun, had a look at the link Postfix is compiled with SASL, and Cyrus with SASL2 I dont want to use 2 'db' files to store the same usernames and passwords, and as I said, I dont want them in Mysql or /etc/passwd - hmmm... was hoping to find a package that I wouldnt have to maintain myself... On Fri, Feb 28, 2003 at 11:40:02PM +0100, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > http://people.debian.org/~hmh/ has a complete set of cyrus and postfix > packages backported from sid to woody. I use them on one of my personal Cheers Andrew
Re: Mail Server Authentication
Hi Teun, had a look at the link Postfix is compiled with SASL, and Cyrus with SASL2 I dont want to use 2 'db' files to store the same usernames and passwords, and as I said, I dont want them in Mysql or /etc/passwd - hmmm... was hoping to find a package that I wouldnt have to maintain myself... On Fri, Feb 28, 2003 at 11:40:02PM +0100, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > http://people.debian.org/~hmh/ has a complete set of cyrus and postfix > packages backported from sid to woody. I use them on one of my personal Cheers Andrew -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Mail Server Authentication
- Original Message - From: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: Cc: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Friday, February 28, 2003 10:03 PM Subject: Mail Server Authentication > Hi all, > > I am currently working on installing a new mail server for a small number of > users (50-100). > > I do NOT want the user account details stored in /etc/passwd, and shadow. > I want to be able to have the following mail addresses as seperate mailboxes. >[EMAIL PROTECTED] >[EMAIL PROTECTED] > > etc... > > Using a database such as postgresql or mysql seems overkill for such a small > number of users. Only three users on this box need shell accounts. > > I also need support for 'SMTP Auth' (tls) > > After some investigation, it seems that the 'best'/ easiest solution is to use > Cyrus and Postfix. > > The issue seemed to be that everyone had there own authentication method, and > Cyrus provides both IMAP and POP3 saving me the trouble of installing yet another > program. > > So therefore I tried to get it all up and running using the SASLDB. > > Unfortunately there seems to be no STABLE version of cyrus-sasl. > http://people.debian.org/~hmh/ has a complete set of cyrus and postfix packages backported from sid to woody. I use them on one of my personal boxes, and they work just fine. It's a postfix + cyrus + jawmail + mysql + spamassassin + amavis setup, also for a small amount of users. We also used it at the ISP I work for for a small mailserver for one of our customers, and it's also working ok. Hope this helps, Teun Vink Luna.nl
Re: Mail Server Authentication
- Original Message - From: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Cc: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Friday, February 28, 2003 10:03 PM Subject: Mail Server Authentication > Hi all, > > I am currently working on installing a new mail server for a small number of > users (50-100). > > I do NOT want the user account details stored in /etc/passwd, and shadow. > I want to be able to have the following mail addresses as seperate mailboxes. >[EMAIL PROTECTED] >[EMAIL PROTECTED] > > etc... > > Using a database such as postgresql or mysql seems overkill for such a small > number of users. Only three users on this box need shell accounts. > > I also need support for 'SMTP Auth' (tls) > > After some investigation, it seems that the 'best'/ easiest solution is to use > Cyrus and Postfix. > > The issue seemed to be that everyone had there own authentication method, and > Cyrus provides both IMAP and POP3 saving me the trouble of installing yet another > program. > > So therefore I tried to get it all up and running using the SASLDB. > > Unfortunately there seems to be no STABLE version of cyrus-sasl. > http://people.debian.org/~hmh/ has a complete set of cyrus and postfix packages backported from sid to woody. I use them on one of my personal boxes, and they work just fine. It's a postfix + cyrus + jawmail + mysql + spamassassin + amavis setup, also for a small amount of users. We also used it at the ISP I work for for a small mailserver for one of our customers, and it's also working ok. Hope this helps, Teun Vink Luna.nl -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Mail server
On Tue, 2003-02-25 at 10:16, Jerome Lacoste (Frisurf) wrote: > [disclaimer: I am not a specialist in mail servers at all] > > I have installed James (check www.apache.org) on one machine and its > developers claim, if I remember correctly, to send several millions of > mails during their performance testing. what? per year? ;^) Sorry, couldn't resist. Hmmm. Mail servers. I add my voice to those recommending postfix - quite easy to configure, and very helpful people on the postfix mailing list (they really know what they are talking about). Your users will be very happy if you install a decent spamfilter - spamassassin is probably one of the best solutions, especially when 2.5 finally comes - just be sure that you never drop a mail without notice. Tag the mail as spam and let the users filter, or bounce it. If you have windows clients, a virus filter will be of some benefit, too (I don't have any recommendation there). cheers -- vbi -- featured link: http://fortytwo.ch/smtp signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part
Re: Mail server
Russell Coker wrote: > > On Mon, 24 Feb 2003 18:34, Colin Ellis wrote: > > Email doesn't really need much processing, but does take > > surprisingly large amounts of disk space. > > Obviously such things differ depending on exactly who is > using the service and what they are doing. > > But my experience is that with modern disks a mail server > will run out of seek > performance before it runs out of space. > > [...] > > If a message delivery takes 10 disk writes (actually it > probably takes more > once you count writing to two files in the queue then writing > it to the spool > and deleting the queue files with lots of fsync() along the > way) then such a > machine can only deliver 13 messages per second. > > I have been considering modifying the Qmail and maildrop code > to not use > fsync() etc to allow more users per server (yes I know about > the reliability > issues, but there are lots of more important things to worry about). Well, qmail is an I/O hog. We have a (small) list-server at a customer which was set up with qmail (w/ el-cheapo 20 GB IDE HDDs). Could only send at ~512 kbit. Then replaced qmail with postfix, now it saturates the customer's T1 without problems... >From my experience, you should use a hardware raid controller w/ (at least) 1 UPM SCSI disks, and postfix+courier imap. CPU power should be no problem, it's seek I/O that matters. Just my 0.02 Euros Thomas
Re: Mail server
[disclaimer: I am not a specialist in mail servers at all] I have installed James (check www.apache.org) on one machine and its developers claim, if I remember correctly, to send several millions of mails during their performance testing. I found it really easy to administrate and I am using MySQL for back-end. The tool is written in Java, so it might not be as fast as other mail servers, but to serve one thousand users, that should be largely sufficient. Cheers, Jerome On Mon, 2003-02-24 at 17:27, Asher Densmore-Lynn wrote: > Can anyone give me any figures on how much machine I need to serve as a > mail server for N users? > > I appreciate that every server is unique, but I can't judge these things > for the life of me, and if I had baseline numbers I could modify them to > suit. \: > > I'm looking at a thousand users, but anything would help. > > -- > Asher Densmore-Lynn <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> -- Jerome Lacoste (Frisurf) <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> CoffeeBreaks
Re: Mail server
On Tue, 2003-02-25 at 10:16, Jerome Lacoste (Frisurf) wrote: > [disclaimer: I am not a specialist in mail servers at all] > > I have installed James (check www.apache.org) on one machine and its > developers claim, if I remember correctly, to send several millions of > mails during their performance testing. what? per year? ;^) Sorry, couldn't resist. Hmmm. Mail servers. I add my voice to those recommending postfix - quite easy to configure, and very helpful people on the postfix mailing list (they really know what they are talking about). Your users will be very happy if you install a decent spamfilter - spamassassin is probably one of the best solutions, especially when 2.5 finally comes - just be sure that you never drop a mail without notice. Tag the mail as spam and let the users filter, or bounce it. If you have windows clients, a virus filter will be of some benefit, too (I don't have any recommendation there). cheers -- vbi -- featured link: http://fortytwo.ch/smtp signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part
Re: Mail server
Russell Coker wrote: > > On Mon, 24 Feb 2003 18:34, Colin Ellis wrote: > > Email doesn't really need much processing, but does take > > surprisingly large amounts of disk space. > > Obviously such things differ depending on exactly who is > using the service and what they are doing. > > But my experience is that with modern disks a mail server > will run out of seek > performance before it runs out of space. > > [...] > > If a message delivery takes 10 disk writes (actually it > probably takes more > once you count writing to two files in the queue then writing > it to the spool > and deleting the queue files with lots of fsync() along the > way) then such a > machine can only deliver 13 messages per second. > > I have been considering modifying the Qmail and maildrop code > to not use > fsync() etc to allow more users per server (yes I know about > the reliability > issues, but there are lots of more important things to worry about). Well, qmail is an I/O hog. We have a (small) list-server at a customer which was set up with qmail (w/ el-cheapo 20 GB IDE HDDs). Could only send at ~512 kbit. Then replaced qmail with postfix, now it saturates the customer's T1 without problems... >From my experience, you should use a hardware raid controller w/ (at least) 1 UPM SCSI disks, and postfix+courier imap. CPU power should be no problem, it's seek I/O that matters. Just my 0.02 Euros Thomas -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Mail server
[disclaimer: I am not a specialist in mail servers at all] I have installed James (check www.apache.org) on one machine and its developers claim, if I remember correctly, to send several millions of mails during their performance testing. I found it really easy to administrate and I am using MySQL for back-end. The tool is written in Java, so it might not be as fast as other mail servers, but to serve one thousand users, that should be largely sufficient. Cheers, Jerome On Mon, 2003-02-24 at 17:27, Asher Densmore-Lynn wrote: > Can anyone give me any figures on how much machine I need to serve as a > mail server for N users? > > I appreciate that every server is unique, but I can't judge these things > for the life of me, and if I had baseline numbers I could modify them to > suit. \: > > I'm looking at a thousand users, but anything would help. > > -- > Asher Densmore-Lynn <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> -- Jerome Lacoste (Frisurf) <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> CoffeeBreaks -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Mail server
On Mon, Feb 24, 2003 at 10:27:56AM -0600, Asher Densmore-Lynn wrote: > Can anyone give me any figures on how much machine I need to serve as a > mail server for N users? > > I appreciate that every server is unique, but I can't judge these things > for the life of me, and if I had baseline numbers I could modify them to > suit. \: > > I'm looking at a thousand users, but anything would help. pretty nearly any relatively "modern" (as in less than 5 years old) machine will be more than capable of handling mail for 1000 users. spend between $500 and $1000 USD on a decent new machine and you'll have no problems. pay attention to the brand/model of the motherboard and the disk drive(s), they are the most important components. this won't give you any crash-proofing or crash-recovery - for that you need RAID 1, 0+1 or 5 disk (it's the only form of "backup" that is any use at all for extremely transient data like email)...which will add significantly to the price. my preference is for RAID-5 with a large non-volatile write-cache...very fast & very safe. craig -- craig sanders <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Fabricati Diem, PVNC. -- motto of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch
Re: Mail server
On Mon, Feb 24, 2003 at 10:27:56AM -0600, Asher Densmore-Lynn wrote: > Can anyone give me any figures on how much machine I need to serve as a > mail server for N users? > > I appreciate that every server is unique, but I can't judge these things > for the life of me, and if I had baseline numbers I could modify them to > suit. \: > > I'm looking at a thousand users, but anything would help. pretty nearly any relatively "modern" (as in less than 5 years old) machine will be more than capable of handling mail for 1000 users. spend between $500 and $1000 USD on a decent new machine and you'll have no problems. pay attention to the brand/model of the motherboard and the disk drive(s), they are the most important components. this won't give you any crash-proofing or crash-recovery - for that you need RAID 1, 0+1 or 5 disk (it's the only form of "backup" that is any use at all for extremely transient data like email)...which will add significantly to the price. my preference is for RAID-5 with a large non-volatile write-cache...very fast & very safe. craig -- craig sanders <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Fabricati Diem, PVNC. -- motto of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Mail server
Lauchlin Wilkinson dijo: > As I said, the most cpu hungry app is the spam filtering. Try Amavis on top of that! ;-) -- .''`. Girl, you gotta change your crazy ways, you hear me? : :' :Crazy by Aerosmith `. `'Proudly running Debian GNU/Linux (Sid + 2.4.20 + Ext3) `-www.amayita.com www.malapecora.com www.chicasduras.com
Re: Mail server
We have one machine that is currently handleing about that many users. It runs Debian 3.0 stable, sendmail, spamassassin (if anyone has a better spam fillter let me know), imap and pop, and the load average is rarely above 0.7. Most of the load comes from spamassassin. Which seems to be normal. At the moment that machine is a Duron 900 with 60GB worth of disk space adn 750MB RAM. 60GB is complete overkill for only 1000 users unless you are planing on giving them huge mail boxes. Which I wouldn't advise. Personaly I run cucipop because it seems a very fast pop server. At the moment I am running uw-imapd as we have few inap clients and the sposed speed isues that that server have I have not noticed. As I said, the most cpu hungry app is the spam filtering. Lauch On Tue, 2003-02-25 at 03:27, Asher Densmore-Lynn wrote: > Can anyone give me any figures on how much machine I need to serve as a > mail server for N users? > > I appreciate that every server is unique, but I can't judge these things > for the life of me, and if I had baseline numbers I could modify them to > suit. \: > > I'm looking at a thousand users, but anything would help. > > -- > Asher Densmore-Lynn <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> >
Re: Mail server
On Mon, 24 Feb 2003 20:59, Rich Puhek wrote: > Russell Coker wrote: > > I have been considering modifying the Qmail and maildrop code to not use > > fsync() etc to allow more users per server (yes I know about the > > reliability issues, but there are lots of more important things to worry > > about). > > Are you using mboxes under /var/spool/mail, or are you using Maildirs > under /home? Maildir's in home directories on a file system dedicated for the task. > If you're using the latter, wouldn't it be easier (and safer) to spread > your home dirs across multiple hard drives (or, more appropriately, > multiple RAID partitions on different disks?) Of course, IIRC, the 2650 > is a 2U server, so you're limited to what you can cram into the box. The 2650 contains 5 hard drives, that's a RAID-5 of 4 disks plus one hot-spare disk. Therefore only one partition for all the storage. > In your particular configuration, have you looked at the > advantages/disadvantages of having something like two disks in RAID 1 > and another 2 or more disks in another RAID set (1 or 5, depending on # > of drives) with the mail spool on one RAID set and the rest of the > filesystems (including /var) on the other? For only 4 active disks I don't expect any great performance benefit from that, and probably a performance loss at times when one array is busy and the other is idle. For 10+ disks I would probably look at a RAID-1 for the spool with the journal on a nvram device and the rest of the disks in a RAID-5 for storage. > Just asking because I have a similar setup to yours (one big HW RAID-5) > and have been wondering if that's the best way to go. If you have an excessive number of disks in the RAID-5 then the OS may not be able to send enough IO requests to it. I don't think that file systems in Linux (with the possible exception of XFS) could deliver good performance on a RAID array of 100 disks. Delivering good performance on 10 file systems that each have 10 disks is much easier to achieve if your data store can easily be striped over 10 file systems (as it can be for mail). A previous mail server I worked on had 192 disks divided into 10 RAID sets for mail storage for this reason. I am not sure how many of the 192 disks were used and how many were spare. I suspect that it was 180 disks in use and 12 spare. -- http://www.coker.com.au/selinux/ My NSA Security Enhanced Linux packages http://www.coker.com.au/bonnie++/ Bonnie++ hard drive benchmark http://www.coker.com.au/postal/Postal SMTP/POP benchmark http://www.coker.com.au/~russell/ My home page
Re: Mail server
Lauchlin Wilkinson dijo: > As I said, the most cpu hungry app is the spam filtering. Try Amavis on top of that! ;-) -- .''`. Girl, you gotta change your crazy ways, you hear me? : :' :Crazy by Aerosmith `. `'Proudly running Debian GNU/Linux (Sid + 2.4.20 + Ext3) `-www.amayita.com www.malapecora.com www.chicasduras.com -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Mail server
We have one machine that is currently handleing about that many users. It runs Debian 3.0 stable, sendmail, spamassassin (if anyone has a better spam fillter let me know), imap and pop, and the load average is rarely above 0.7. Most of the load comes from spamassassin. Which seems to be normal. At the moment that machine is a Duron 900 with 60GB worth of disk space adn 750MB RAM. 60GB is complete overkill for only 1000 users unless you are planing on giving them huge mail boxes. Which I wouldn't advise. Personaly I run cucipop because it seems a very fast pop server. At the moment I am running uw-imapd as we have few inap clients and the sposed speed isues that that server have I have not noticed. As I said, the most cpu hungry app is the spam filtering. Lauch On Tue, 2003-02-25 at 03:27, Asher Densmore-Lynn wrote: > Can anyone give me any figures on how much machine I need to serve as a > mail server for N users? > > I appreciate that every server is unique, but I can't judge these things > for the life of me, and if I had baseline numbers I could modify them to > suit. \: > > I'm looking at a thousand users, but anything would help. > > -- > Asher Densmore-Lynn <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Mail server
On Mon, 24 Feb 2003 20:59, Rich Puhek wrote: > Russell Coker wrote: > > I have been considering modifying the Qmail and maildrop code to not use > > fsync() etc to allow more users per server (yes I know about the > > reliability issues, but there are lots of more important things to worry > > about). > > Are you using mboxes under /var/spool/mail, or are you using Maildirs > under /home? Maildir's in home directories on a file system dedicated for the task. > If you're using the latter, wouldn't it be easier (and safer) to spread > your home dirs across multiple hard drives (or, more appropriately, > multiple RAID partitions on different disks?) Of course, IIRC, the 2650 > is a 2U server, so you're limited to what you can cram into the box. The 2650 contains 5 hard drives, that's a RAID-5 of 4 disks plus one hot-spare disk. Therefore only one partition for all the storage. > In your particular configuration, have you looked at the > advantages/disadvantages of having something like two disks in RAID 1 > and another 2 or more disks in another RAID set (1 or 5, depending on # > of drives) with the mail spool on one RAID set and the rest of the > filesystems (including /var) on the other? For only 4 active disks I don't expect any great performance benefit from that, and probably a performance loss at times when one array is busy and the other is idle. For 10+ disks I would probably look at a RAID-1 for the spool with the journal on a nvram device and the rest of the disks in a RAID-5 for storage. > Just asking because I have a similar setup to yours (one big HW RAID-5) > and have been wondering if that's the best way to go. If you have an excessive number of disks in the RAID-5 then the OS may not be able to send enough IO requests to it. I don't think that file systems in Linux (with the possible exception of XFS) could deliver good performance on a RAID array of 100 disks. Delivering good performance on 10 file systems that each have 10 disks is much easier to achieve if your data store can easily be striped over 10 file systems (as it can be for mail). A previous mail server I worked on had 192 disks divided into 10 RAID sets for mail storage for this reason. I am not sure how many of the 192 disks were used and how many were spare. I suspect that it was 180 disks in use and 12 spare. -- http://www.coker.com.au/selinux/ My NSA Security Enhanced Linux packages http://www.coker.com.au/bonnie++/ Bonnie++ hard drive benchmark http://www.coker.com.au/postal/Postal SMTP/POP benchmark http://www.coker.com.au/~russell/ My home page -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Mail server
- Original Message - From: "Russell Coker" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "Colin Ellis" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Cc: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Monday, February 24, 2003 7:16 PM Subject: Re: Mail server > > If a message delivery takes 10 disk writes (actually it probably takes more > once you count writing to two files in the queue then writing it to the spool > and deleting the queue files with lots of fsync() along the way) then such a > machine can only deliver 13 messages per second. > > I'm running a number of mail servers with lots of spare disk space that are > hitting the message delivery limits, which prevents me adding more users. > I totally agree with Russel; disk speed is probably the most important limiting factor, not CPU speed or diskspace. To add some more numbers: I've just been doing some benchmarks to test different filesystem/mailserver combinations, testing with Russel's excellent Postal benchmark program. The best result on our testmachine (celeron 1700, 256 megs of RAM, 80 GB 7200 rpm IDE disk) have been a constant 30-35 messages per second. This was with a combination of XFS, Exim and Maildir storage, and with a maximum message size of 10K. A more realistic 100K maximum size still resulted in about 20-25 deliveries per second. These numbers are, however, only for mail delivery using SMTP; retrieving the mail using either POP or IMAP will add significant load. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Mail server
Russell Coker wrote: I have been considering modifying the Qmail and maildrop code to not use fsync() etc to allow more users per server (yes I know about the reliability issues, but there are lots of more important things to worry about). Are you using mboxes under /var/spool/mail, or are you using Maildirs under /home? If you're using the latter, wouldn't it be easier (and safer) to spread your home dirs across multiple hard drives (or, more appropriately, multiple RAID partitions on different disks?) Of course, IIRC, the 2650 is a 2U server, so you're limited to what you can cram into the box. In your particular configuration, have you looked at the advantages/disadvantages of having something like two disks in RAID 1 and another 2 or more disks in another RAID set (1 or 5, depending on # of drives) with the mail spool on one RAID set and the rest of the filesystems (including /var) on the other? Just asking because I have a similar setup to yours (one big HW RAID-5) and have been wondering if that's the best way to go. --Rich _ Rich Puhek ETN Systems Inc. 2125 1st Ave East Hibbing MN 55746 tel: 218.262.1130 email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] _ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Mail server
Asher Densmore-Lynn wrote: Can anyone give me any figures on how much machine I need to serve as a mail server for N users? I appreciate that every server is unique, but I can't judge these things for the life of me, and if I had baseline numbers I could modify them to suit. \: I'm looking at a thousand users, but anything would help. Depends more on the software than on the numer of users. And the number of users isn't really interesting. It's interesting how much traffic they generate. I was running sendmail+popper on a P2-500MHz, 512MB RAM with some users popping every minute - about 1 mails in/minute and 10 pop-connections/minute and had a load-average of about 1.0 - and in times with much bounces up to 20. Now we're running postfix with courier-pop/imap, AntiVir, Spamfilter on a P4-1.7GHz with 512MB RAM and an IPC-Vortex-SCSI-RAID-Controller for the spool. Also installed is a webmail, the User-Database comes from LDAP (also running local) and we have a load of nearly 0 - and slightly more traffic. I'd suggest you use qmail or postfix. On the postfix-mailinglist are some people with a _lot_ of traffic (thousands of messages / minute) and they handle this also with something with about 1GHz - mail-delivery isn't really a CPU-issue, it's highly I/O-based so fast disk give you much more performance than a faster CPU. regards -- \\\ ||| /// _\=/_ ( @ @ )(o o) +oOOo-(_)-oOOo--oOOo-(_)-oOOo--+ | Markus Schabel TGM - Die Schule der Technik www.tgm.ac.at | | IT-Service A-1200 Wien, Wexstrasse 19-23 net.tgm.ac.at | | [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tel.: +43(1)33126/316 | | [EMAIL PROTECTED] Fax.: +43(1)33126/154 | | FSF Associate Member #597, Linux User #259595 (counter.li.org) | |oOOoYet Another Spam Trap: oOOo | | ()oOOo[EMAIL PROTECTED] ( ) oOOo | +\ (( )--\ ( -( )-+ \_) ) /\_) ) / (_/ (_/ Computers are like airconditioners: They stop working properly if you open windows. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Mail server
On Mon, 24 Feb 2003 18:34, Colin Ellis wrote: > Email doesn't really need much processing, but does take surprisingly large > amounts of disk space. Obviously such things differ depending on exactly who is using the service and what they are doing. But my experience is that with modern disks a mail server will run out of seek performance before it runs out of space. The fastest drives (15000rpm) will take an average of 4ms for the disk to spin to the correct location to start a transfer in addition to the seek times for moving the heads. That gives a performance of something less than 100 IO operations per second per disk. I am working on a bunch of Dell PowerEdge 2650 machines with 4*U160 15000rpm SCSI disks in a hardware RAID-5 with a battery backed write-back cache. This gives a peak performance of about 130 disk writes per second. If a message delivery takes 10 disk writes (actually it probably takes more once you count writing to two files in the queue then writing it to the spool and deleting the queue files with lots of fsync() along the way) then such a machine can only deliver 13 messages per second. I'm running a number of mail servers with lots of spare disk space that are hitting the message delivery limits, which prevents me adding more users. I have been considering modifying the Qmail and maildrop code to not use fsync() etc to allow more users per server (yes I know about the reliability issues, but there are lots of more important things to worry about). If you need more space then there's lots of good options nowadays. 200G IDE drives are getting cheap, I'll probably get a RAID-1 of them for my next home machine. 70G U160 SCSI drives give better performance, and I'm finding that their performance is a bottleneck not their size. Of course bigger drives tend to be faster if all other things are equal. For the servers I'm using I'd rather have 140G U160 drives, I'd still be using <70G of them, but the performance would be better. -- http://www.coker.com.au/selinux/ My NSA Security Enhanced Linux packages http://www.coker.com.au/bonnie++/ Bonnie++ hard drive benchmark http://www.coker.com.au/postal/Postal SMTP/POP benchmark http://www.coker.com.au/~russell/ My home page -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Mail server
Asher Densmore-Lynn wrote: Can anyone give me any figures on how much machine I need to serve as a mail server for N users? I appreciate that every server is unique, but I can't judge these things for the life of me, and if I had baseline numbers I could modify them to suit. \: I'm looking at a thousand users, but anything would help. how long is a pice of string? a p120 with 32meg of ram can handle 30 users with ease. A p2-350 with 128 meg 200 with ease, depends on the use its put to. I doubt its linear scaling, give us some numbers. Thing -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Mail server
On Mon, 24 Feb 2003 17:27, Asher Densmore-Lynn wrote: > Can anyone give me any figures on how much machine I need to serve as a > mail server for N users? > > I appreciate that every server is unique, but I can't judge these things > for the life of me, and if I had baseline numbers I could modify them to > suit. \: > > I'm looking at a thousand users, but anything would help. It depends on who those users are and what they do. For 1000 users of a dial-up ISP you don't need anything special, no-one sells hardware that is so small it can't handle such a load. For 1000 users of a corporate LAN attaching Word and PowerPoint documents to their email you'll need a fairly decent server, get a couple of gigs of RAM and 4-5 disks in a RAID array and it should be fine. -- http://www.coker.com.au/selinux/ My NSA Security Enhanced Linux packages http://www.coker.com.au/bonnie++/ Bonnie++ hard drive benchmark http://www.coker.com.au/postal/Postal SMTP/POP benchmark http://www.coker.com.au/~russell/ My home page -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Mail server
If its of any help, at my last firm, we had 1000 email domains all using different setup's their were 900 pop accounts checking their mail every 5 - 10 mins our set up was Sendmail 8.11 Debian 3.0 kernel 2.4.18 intel 550Mhz 256Mb Ram 40Gb Hd Machine load never above 0.7 Asher Densmore-Lynn wrote: Can anyone give me any figures on how much machine I need to serve as a mail server for N users? I appreciate that every server is unique, but I can't judge these things for the life of me, and if I had baseline numbers I could modify them to suit. \: I'm looking at a thousand users, but anything would help. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
RE: Mail server
Your question is certainly quite vague, but here are a few things to think about.. What mail delivery program are you thinking of using and are you planning on providing pop3 and/or imap service? Imap requires more processing power to display the mail folders, but it depends on the software again. What kind of disk quota are you thinking of setting for your users? Email can take up a lot of space, and outgoing mail also needs to be stored in a queue. In terms of processing/memory requirements, I'd suggest pentium II (400MHz) upwards with at least 512MB ram. Email doesn't really need much processing, but does take surprisingly large amounts of disk space. The disks are probably the limiting factor in what hardware config you are looking at. Hope this helps, Colin Ellis Solution City Ltd http://www.solution-city.com -Original Message- From: Asher Densmore-Lynn [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: 24 February 2003 16:28 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Mail server Can anyone give me any figures on how much machine I need to serve as a mail server for N users? I appreciate that every server is unique, but I can't judge these things for the life of me, and if I had baseline numbers I could modify them to suit. \: I'm looking at a thousand users, but anything would help. -- Asher Densmore-Lynn <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Mail server
On Sun, 4 Nov 2001 01:55, James wrote: > I'm going to be setting up a mail server (Exim + uwimapd + IMP webmail) > that will serve about 300-500 users. > > There will not be a major amount of traffic being put through it and was > wondering if anyone had any cost effective hardware recommendations for > CPU/RAM/HD space? As someone else already mentioned the hardware requirements vary a lot depending on the details of the use. I know of one site that was using a fully loaded Sun E450 to serve mail for <1000 users (LAN connected and mailing MS-Word document attachments around all day). OTOH I've setup small ISP servers with 300 accounts on machines that make a P-233 look grunty. In terms of bang for buck I once ran a university mail server for 27,000 accounts mostly using POP but also some mutt and elm use. It ran on a machine that was a very old RS/6000 that gave similar performance to my Thinkpad on most benchmarks. Of course that machine didn't perform too well until I replaced the mbox stores with Maildir and used hashing for /etc/passwd... -- http://www.coker.com.au/bonnie++/ Bonnie++ hard drive benchmark http://www.coker.com.au/postal/ Postal SMTP/POP benchmark http://www.coker.com.au/projects.html Projects I am working on http://www.coker.com.au/~russell/ My home page
Re: Mail server
On Sun, 4 Nov 2001 01:55, James wrote: > I'm going to be setting up a mail server (Exim + uwimapd + IMP webmail) > that will serve about 300-500 users. > > There will not be a major amount of traffic being put through it and was > wondering if anyone had any cost effective hardware recommendations for > CPU/RAM/HD space? As someone else already mentioned the hardware requirements vary a lot depending on the details of the use. I know of one site that was using a fully loaded Sun E450 to serve mail for <1000 users (LAN connected and mailing MS-Word document attachments around all day). OTOH I've setup small ISP servers with 300 accounts on machines that make a P-233 look grunty. In terms of bang for buck I once ran a university mail server for 27,000 accounts mostly using POP but also some mutt and elm use. It ran on a machine that was a very old RS/6000 that gave similar performance to my Thinkpad on most benchmarks. Of course that machine didn't perform too well until I replaced the mbox stores with Maildir and used hashing for /etc/passwd... -- http://www.coker.com.au/bonnie++/ Bonnie++ hard drive benchmark http://www.coker.com.au/postal/ Postal SMTP/POP benchmark http://www.coker.com.au/projects.html Projects I am working on http://www.coker.com.au/~russell/ My home page -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Mail server
> I'm going to be setting up a mail server (Exim + uwimapd + IMP webmail) > that will serve about 300-500 users. > > There will not be a major amount of traffic being put through it and was > wondering if anyone had any cost effective hardware recommendations for > CPU/RAM/HD space? You can reduce the recommended hardware a bit if you use Courier IMAP, which is far more performant than uwimapd. :) - Jeff -- "In addition to these ample facilities, there exists a powerful configuration tool called gcc." - Elliot Hughes, author of lwm
Re: Mail server
How often will these people be checking email? ONLY through the webmail interface, or will they be checking by pop3, imap, etc.? If they start playing around with imap and storing large files and attachments on your server, the requirements will vary greatly. If you're doing a Hotmail setup (2Mb each user), then you can get by with virtually any kinda hardware above a pentium 233MMX ;-) Sincerely, Jason - Original Message - From: "James" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: Sent: Sunday, November 04, 2001 11:55 AM Subject: Mail server > I'm going to be setting up a mail server (Exim + uwimapd + IMP webmail) > that will serve about 300-500 users. > > There will not be a major amount of traffic being put through it and was > wondering if anyone had any cost effective hardware recommendations for > CPU/RAM/HD space? > > - James > > > -- > To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] > with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED] > http://www.zentek-international.com >
Re: Mail server
> I'm going to be setting up a mail server (Exim + uwimapd + IMP webmail) > that will serve about 300-500 users. > > There will not be a major amount of traffic being put through it and was > wondering if anyone had any cost effective hardware recommendations for > CPU/RAM/HD space? You can reduce the recommended hardware a bit if you use Courier IMAP, which is far more performant than uwimapd. :) - Jeff -- "In addition to these ample facilities, there exists a powerful configuration tool called gcc." - Elliot Hughes, author of lwm -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Mail server
How often will these people be checking email? ONLY through the webmail interface, or will they be checking by pop3, imap, etc.? If they start playing around with imap and storing large files and attachments on your server, the requirements will vary greatly. If you're doing a Hotmail setup (2Mb each user), then you can get by with virtually any kinda hardware above a pentium 233MMX ;-) Sincerely, Jason - Original Message - From: "James" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Sunday, November 04, 2001 11:55 AM Subject: Mail server > I'm going to be setting up a mail server (Exim + uwimapd + IMP webmail) > that will serve about 300-500 users. > > There will not be a major amount of traffic being put through it and was > wondering if anyone had any cost effective hardware recommendations for > CPU/RAM/HD space? > > - James > > > -- > To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] > with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED] > http://www.zentek-international.com > -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Mail Server Virus Protection
On Sat, Oct 13, 2001 at 02:42:03PM -0400, Gene Grimm wrote: > I don't recall if I have seen anything on this list regarding the issue of > scanning messages for viruses as they are processed by a Linux-based mail > server. If there is such a package, where can I find information on this > such as the format for mail storage and configuration? Thanks for any > assistance you can provide. We use Amavis from http://www.amavis.org/. It is a GPL application. It works well for us. Amavis will work with Sendmail, Postfix, and Qmail (and possibly others). You will also need a virus scanner to plug in to it. We use Amavis + Sendmail + McAffee. Sendmail's libmilter is great! - Jean-Paul Stewart Senior Systems Administrator CarbonMedia, Inc. 114 East 25th Street, Eighth Floor New York, NY 10010 Phone: 212.253.7180 Fax: 212.253.8467 http://www.carbonmedia.com/
Re: Mail Server Virus Protection
On Sat, Oct 13, 2001 at 02:42:03PM -0400, Gene Grimm wrote: > I don't recall if I have seen anything on this list regarding the issue of > scanning messages for viruses as they are processed by a Linux-based mail > server. If there is such a package, where can I find information on this > such as the format for mail storage and configuration? Thanks for any > assistance you can provide. We use Amavis from http://www.amavis.org/. It is a GPL application. It works well for us. Amavis will work with Sendmail, Postfix, and Qmail (and possibly others). You will also need a virus scanner to plug in to it. We use Amavis + Sendmail + McAffee. Sendmail's libmilter is great! - Jean-Paul Stewart Senior Systems Administrator CarbonMedia, Inc. 114 East 25th Street, Eighth Floor New York, NY 10010 Phone: 212.253.7180 Fax: 212.253.8467 http://www.carbonmedia.com/ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Mail Server Virus Protection
I have set up a server with exiscan along with McAfee VirusScan for Linux and it has worked quite well. The only problem is that messages aren't delivered immediately, there are queued until the exiscan script checks them for virus's. Exim normally attempts to deliver mail straight away. Apart from that I am rather happy with it. Andrew Tait System Administrator Country NetLink Pty, Ltd E-Mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] WWW: http://www.cnl.com.au 30 Bank St Cobram, VIC 3644, Australia Ph: +61 (03) 58 711 000 Fax: +61 (03) 58 711 874 "It's the smell! If there is such a thing." Agent Smith - The Matrix - Original Message - From: "Jeremy C. Reed" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "Debian ISP Mailing List" Sent: Sunday, October 07, 2001 8:37 AM Subject: Re: Mail Server Virus Protection > Another scanner (which I haven't tried yet) is exiscan: > > http://duncanthrax.net/exiscan/ says: > > ... works together with the Exim MTA designed to be very easy to > implement. Exiscan supports multithreaded unpacking and scanning of > mail, with a configurable number of processes. Exiscan has generic > support for available command line virus scanners. Exiscan can scan > inside of MS-TNEF and SMIME (signed) wrapped messages. > > I started making a list of different filters and scanners: > http://www.reedmedia.net/misc/mail/filters.html > (If anyone wants to share some comments for my page, please do.) > > Jeremy C. Reed > ... > ISP-FAQ.com -- find answers to your questions > http://www.isp-faq.com/ > > > -- > To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] > with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED] > >
Re: Mail Server Virus Protection
I have set up a server with exiscan along with McAfee VirusScan for Linux and it has worked quite well. The only problem is that messages aren't delivered immediately, there are queued until the exiscan script checks them for virus's. Exim normally attempts to deliver mail straight away. Apart from that I am rather happy with it. Andrew Tait System Administrator Country NetLink Pty, Ltd E-Mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] WWW: http://www.cnl.com.au 30 Bank St Cobram, VIC 3644, Australia Ph: +61 (03) 58 711 000 Fax: +61 (03) 58 711 874 "It's the smell! If there is such a thing." Agent Smith - The Matrix - Original Message - From: "Jeremy C. Reed" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "Debian ISP Mailing List" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Sunday, October 07, 2001 8:37 AM Subject: Re: Mail Server Virus Protection > Another scanner (which I haven't tried yet) is exiscan: > > http://duncanthrax.net/exiscan/ says: > > ... works together with the Exim MTA designed to be very easy to > implement. Exiscan supports multithreaded unpacking and scanning of > mail, with a configurable number of processes. Exiscan has generic > support for available command line virus scanners. Exiscan can scan > inside of MS-TNEF and SMIME (signed) wrapped messages. > > I started making a list of different filters and scanners: > http://www.reedmedia.net/misc/mail/filters.html > (If anyone wants to share some comments for my page, please do.) > > Jeremy C. Reed > ... > ISP-FAQ.com -- find answers to your questions > http://www.isp-faq.com/ > > > -- > To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] > with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Mail Server Virus Protection
Another scanner (which I haven't tried yet) is exiscan: http://duncanthrax.net/exiscan/ says: ... works together with the Exim MTA designed to be very easy to implement. Exiscan supports multithreaded unpacking and scanning of mail, with a configurable number of processes. Exiscan has generic support for available command line virus scanners. Exiscan can scan inside of MS-TNEF and SMIME (signed) wrapped messages. I started making a list of different filters and scanners: http://www.reedmedia.net/misc/mail/filters.html (If anyone wants to share some comments for my page, please do.) Jeremy C. Reed ... ISP-FAQ.com -- find answers to your questions http://www.isp-faq.com/ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Mail Server Virus Protection
On Sat, Oct 06, 2001 at 10:49:45PM +0200, Stojan Rancic wrote: > > > Yeah, only it crashes on larger mails and fills up whole disk with some > > binary crap instead of report :-> > > What do you consider "larger mails" ? Anything that exceeds half of ulimit. (Even less in case of larger mails). > I disagree, AVP installed automatically, Well, in my case it just died without saying what's the matter. > altough avcheck needed to be > installed additionally, but avcheck is a separate product anyway (mailing > list at http://innominate.org/mailman/listinfo/avcheck ) Hmm.. I didn't know about that one... > Here we agree, unfortunately :-( But what AV product/combo out there is ? ---8 #!/bin/sh cat <> ~/.procmailrc :0 * X-Mailer: Micros /dev/null END --- Seriously, though: i don't know any such piece of software. Marcin -- Marcin Owsiany <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://marcin.owsiany.pl/ GnuPG: 1024D/60F41216 FE67 DA2D 0ACA FC5E 3F75 D6F6 3A0D 8AA0 60F4 1216 -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Mail Server Virus Protection
On Sat, Oct 06, 2001 at 10:31:56PM +0200, Stojan Rancic wrote: > > >> Thanks for any assistance you can provide. > > > Don't use AVP. It's a piece of crap. > > Actually, AVP with avcheck seem to work splendidly here, in > combination with Postfix, scanning quite a number of mails every day > and blocking the plague of Win32 viruses.. Yeah, only it crashes on larger mails and fills up whole disk with some binary crap instead of report :-> Installer doesn't even run, you need to install it manually. And of course it's as non free as it can be. Marcin -- Marcin Owsiany <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://marcin.owsiany.pl/ GnuPG: 1024D/60F41216 FE67 DA2D 0ACA FC5E 3F75 D6F6 3A0D 8AA0 60F4 1216 -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Mail Server Virus Protection
On Sat, Oct 13, 2001 at 02:42:03PM -0400, Gene Grimm wrote: > I don't recall if I have seen anything on this list regarding the issue of > scanning messages for viruses as they are processed by a Linux-based mail > server. If there is such a package, where can I find information on this > such as the format for mail storage and configuration? Thanks for any > assistance you can provide. Don't use AVP. It's a piece of crap. Marcin -- Marcin Owsiany <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://marcin.owsiany.pl/ GnuPG: 1024D/60F41216 FE67 DA2D 0ACA FC5E 3F75 D6F6 3A0D 8AA0 60F4 1216 -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: mail server w/ 65000++ users
On Tue, 16 May 2000, Mark Brown wrote: > On Tue, May 16, 2000 at 12:28:40PM +0200, Robert Varga wrote: > > > Its documentation is a joke I think. It is 800 pages, but unusable for > > anything but reading it from the start, but if you want to search in it > > quickly and haven't read it before, because you just want to put in > > something, then it is unusable. > > Depends on what you're after in terms of documentation, of course - I > always found it quite nice when I used Exim. It's also worth looking at > the FAQ which is more oriented towards "I'd like to..." when you don't > know the sort of Exim feature you'd use. It fulfils a lot of the roles > of a tutorial-type section in the manual. I told what I told from my experience. I tried to set up virtual users and virtual domains, looked at the FAQ, and did not know where to put in the config file, what I found there. It's simply unusable this way, or at least it was that a year ago when I tried it. Even sendmail documentation is better than that, at least I managed to do it with sendmail which I put up instead of exim then. After that, I looked at qmail, and now I don't install anything else on any machine I install. > > > Speed: much slower than qmail. > > It's not that bad - from my memories of both Exim and qmail I think that > qmail has some much more aggressive defaults than Exim. I could be > wrong on that, but it's certainly possible to push a good load through > Exim. > You should try a stress test. :) Robert
Re: mail server w/ 65000++ users
On Tue, May 16, 2000 at 12:28:40PM +0200, Robert Varga wrote: > Its documentation is a joke I think. It is 800 pages, but unusable for > anything but reading it from the start, but if you want to search in it > quickly and haven't read it before, because you just want to put in > something, then it is unusable. Depends on what you're after in terms of documentation, of course - I always found it quite nice when I used Exim. It's also worth looking at the FAQ which is more oriented towards "I'd like to..." when you don't know the sort of Exim feature you'd use. It fulfils a lot of the roles of a tutorial-type section in the manual. > Speed: much slower than qmail. It's not that bad - from my memories of both Exim and qmail I think that qmail has some much more aggressive defaults than Exim. I could be wrong on that, but it's certainly possible to push a good load through Exim. -- Mark Brown mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] (Trying to avoid grumpiness) http://www.tardis.ed.ac.uk/~broonie/ EUFShttp://www.eusa.ed.ac.uk/societies/filmsoc/ pgpxDLl0fmaXM.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: mail server w/ 65000++ users
Exim: Its documentation is a joke I think. It is 800 pages, but unusable for anything but reading it from the start, but if you want to search in it quickly and haven't read it before, because you just want to put in something, then it is unusable. Features: probably rich enough. Speed: much slower than qmail. Regards, Robert Varga On Mon, 15 May 2000, Irwan Hadi wrote: > At 01:03 PM 5/15/00 +0200, Russell Coker wrote: > >On Mon, 15 May 2000, Robert Varga wrote: > >Qmail isn't a regular package because it's got licence issues. > > > >Also Qmail is lacking in functionality when compared to Postfix, Sendmail, or > >probably any other Unix mail server. Qmail is fast and reliable, it's good > >for installing for one of those clients who is expected to stuff up Postfix > >config files. > > how about exim then ? (Www.exim.org) > >
Re: mail server w/ 65000++ users
At 01:03 PM 5/15/00 +0200, Russell Coker wrote: On Mon, 15 May 2000, Robert Varga wrote: Qmail isn't a regular package because it's got licence issues. Also Qmail is lacking in functionality when compared to Postfix, Sendmail, or probably any other Unix mail server. Qmail is fast and reliable, it's good for installing for one of those clients who is expected to stuff up Postfix config files. how about exim then ? (Www.exim.org)
Re: mail server w/ 65000++ users
>> >Use qmail and vpopmail. They are both packaged to debian, so there should >> >not be much of a problem for it. >> >> Qmail isn't a regular package because it's got licence issues. >> > >It is in debian in source package form, it can be built with one command, >so it is not a real problem I think. It just makes things more difficult. >> For a serious server system it will rapidly become annoying for the >> administrator because it just won't do the things you want. >> >> Try spam blocking (both ORBs and header filtering) and address re-writing for >> two things that Qmail falls down on. > >Address rewriting: look at the mess822 package on DJB's homepage, for one. >For address rewriting in messages originating on the qmail host, it is >even easier than that. You just need to wrap qmail-inject. I have done it >and it is not that hard to do. Much easier in Postfix where the functionality is built in. >> I doubt that Qmail is any more secure than Postfix. I doubt that it is any >> faster. >> > >It can be said the other way round as well. I don't personally know True. >postfix, but I don't think it would be faster than qmail. About security: >there is one thing with postfix: it is under current development, ergo it >always can contain newly introduced security holes. Of course that also You can put the package on hold so that dselect won't upgrade it... >means fast error fixes, however. Qmail is unfortunately not under visible >development, no one knows what DJB does currently with qmail. > >The licencing is the biggest drawback in qmail I think. Yes. -- My current location - X marks the spot. X X X
Re: mail server w/ 65000++ users
On Mon, 15 May 2000, Russell Coker wrote: > On Mon, 15 May 2000, Robert Varga wrote: > >Use qmail and vpopmail. They are both packaged to debian, so there should > >not be much of a problem for it. > > Qmail isn't a regular package because it's got licence issues. > It is in debian in source package form, it can be built with one command, so it is not a real problem I think. > Also Qmail is lacking in functionality when compared to Postfix, Sendmail, or > probably any other Unix mail server. Qmail is fast and reliable, it's good > for installing for one of those clients who is expected to stuff up Postfix > config files. I did not really find any lacking functionality for my needs currently, and we are using it as an ISP customer mailserver and as a company mailserver as well. > > For a serious server system it will rapidly become annoying for the > administrator because it just won't do the things you want. > > Try spam blocking (both ORBs and header filtering) and address re-writing for > two things that Qmail falls down on. Address rewriting: look at the mess822 package on DJB's homepage, for one. For address rewriting in messages originating on the qmail host, it is even easier than that. You just need to wrap qmail-inject. I have done it and it is not that hard to do. SPAM blocking: it is not that hard to do, the biggest problem is always the algorithm and patterns you filter on. > > >Mails are stored in maildir format, which is NFS-safe without the need of > >locking. > > Postfix does this too. > > >I have no experience with Postfix myself, but qmail is regarded as the > >fastest and most secure mailserver, and I think it is much easier > >configurable than sendmail or exim. I really have no problem with it > >myself. > > Being easier to configure than Sendmail is an understatement. Sendmail is > the hardest to configure and Qmail is the easiest. > > I doubt that Qmail is any more secure than Postfix. I doubt that it is any > faster. > It can be said the other way round as well. I don't personally know postfix, but I don't think it would be faster than qmail. About security: there is one thing with postfix: it is under current development, ergo it always can contain newly introduced security holes. Of course that also means fast error fixes, however. Qmail is unfortunately not under visible development, no one knows what DJB does currently with qmail. The licencing is the biggest drawback in qmail I think.
Re: mail server w/ 65000++ users
On Mon, 15 May 2000, Robert Varga wrote: >Use qmail and vpopmail. They are both packaged to debian, so there should >not be much of a problem for it. Qmail isn't a regular package because it's got licence issues. Also Qmail is lacking in functionality when compared to Postfix, Sendmail, or probably any other Unix mail server. Qmail is fast and reliable, it's good for installing for one of those clients who is expected to stuff up Postfix config files. For a serious server system it will rapidly become annoying for the administrator because it just won't do the things you want. Try spam blocking (both ORBs and header filtering) and address re-writing for two things that Qmail falls down on. >Mails are stored in maildir format, which is NFS-safe without the need of >locking. Postfix does this too. >I have no experience with Postfix myself, but qmail is regarded as the >fastest and most secure mailserver, and I think it is much easier >configurable than sendmail or exim. I really have no problem with it >myself. Being easier to configure than Sendmail is an understatement. Sendmail is the hardest to configure and Qmail is the easiest. I doubt that Qmail is any more secure than Postfix. I doubt that it is any faster. -- My current location - X marks the spot. X X X
Re: mail server w/ 65000++ users
On Mon, 15 May 2000, Chad A. Adlawan wrote: >> For best performance have no direct TCP connections between your mail server >> and the outside world. Have the MX records point to an inbound-relay which >> sends the mail to the real server. > > hello :-) > > i pretty much dont get this part. what should be done is to point the >MX record to another mail server ? what also confused me is, how does that >server send the mail to the "real server" ? errr, did i ask the right >question ? Firstly could you please configure your email client to put no more than 79 characters on each line, it makes things easier to read and to quote. You have the inbound relay configured to send all mail for the domain to the IP address of the real server. Or you could just configure the inbound relay to send all mail it receives to the real mail server. -- My current location - X marks the spot. X X X
Re: mail server w/ 65000++ users
Use qmail and vpopmail. They are both packaged to debian, so there should not be much of a problem for it. Vpopmail is a virtual domain pop3 server suited for serving as many as 23million POP3 mailboxes taking up only one system user, integrating with qmail and other qmail-extension software. It can store user information in cdb datafiles or in a mysql database. It can serve virtual domains. Of course it also provides POP3 for the system users as well. In the upcoming version postgresql and oracle databases can also serve as a means for storing user information. Mails are stored in maildir format, which is NFS-safe without the need of locking. Qmail package can be built from the qmail-src package. Vpopmail package can be built from the source downloaded from www.sury.cz/Debian/vpopmail or you can find binary versions of the package as well at the same place. I suggest downloading the source since a few options need to be set at compile-time, although the packager did incorporate a few things to provide a means for runtime configuration, but not every option is runtime configurable, yet. An IMAP server is also provided for qmail and vpopmail called courier-imap, it is also packaged for debian as far as I remember, but I haven't tried installing it yet. Ask the vpopmail packager about installation comments. I have no experience with Postfix myself, but qmail is regarded as the fastest and most secure mailserver, and I think it is much easier configurable than sendmail or exim. I really have no problem with it myself. Regards, Robert Varga On Sun, 14 May 2000, Russell Coker wrote: > On Fri, 12 May 2000, Craig Sanders wrote: > >On Fri, May 12, 2000 at 04:10:40PM +0800, Chad A. Adlawan wrote: > >> does anybody have any URL's or docs w/ talks on how to build > >> a mail server (both Exim and Sendmail are OK w/ me) with more > >> than 65,000 users ? i.e., what are the available methods (and > >> what are the best ones) of having mail users w/o having them on > >> /etc/passwd. > > > >i'd suggest postfix + cyrus. from comments in the postfix-users list, it > >seems to be a nearly ideal combination for doing what you want. > > I'd suggest Postfix + the Qmail POP server. Postfix (and Postfix-tls) are in > Debian. There's a package of the Qmail source which allows you to compile > your own Qmail POP server. > > Cyrus uses a different mail storage format to anything else and sequesters > all your mail. > > For users who aren't in the /etc/passwd file use LDAP, give all users the > same UID and with /dev/null as the shell (so they can't login). > > Use the NSS modules for LDAP. > > >hint, for performance you probably want to look at a machine with > >multiple fast scsci drives for the mail spool (raid striping), formatted > >with reiserfs. and lots of memory, of course. CPU speed isn't a big > >issue - mail systems are I/O bound. > > Last year I was working on an AIX machine (AIX is slow) that had old 2G and > 4G SSA drives (drive performance was less than my Thinkpad in every test). > The AIX machine ran 27000 mail accounts, an Oracle server, and some shell > accounts. After I had finished with it performance was quite OK. > > It really depends on the type of access the machine will get. 27000 > university students don't produce much load (especially when most of them are > arts students who only check mail once a week). 1000 people on a corporate > network sending emails with Word and Excel documents attached will produce > 1000 times the load. > > When mail is being delivered and immidiately downloaded via POP (no mail left > on server) my Thinkpad 600E (10G IDE hard drive, Celeron 400) can do 20G of > email traffic a day. An ISP with >50 users I know of has about 15G of > email a day. > > For best performance have no direct TCP connections between your mail server > and the outside world. Have the MX records point to an inbound-relay which > sends the mail to the real server. Have the clients SMTP relay address point > to a machine that's configured to just be an outbound relay. Have your > server setup with ipchains or TCP wrappers to deny SMTP connections from > machines other than the inbound relay. > When mail comes from the Internet it generally comes in slowly, and in > spurts. This hurts the caching on the queue partition. Have the mail come > in from the inbound relay (or relays, you'll need several for a big system) > in only a small number of TCP connections. That way data will generally > never be read from the queue partition (it'll be in the cache). > > Have seperate physical media for the queue file system. All writes of email > data are synchronous. Writing the queue data generally involves creating 2 > or 3 queue files synchronously and one mail-store file (for maildir). This > can make the queue a performance bottleneck for the mail system. Have a > seperate pair of hard drives in RAID-1 setup for the queue and you'll save > disk bandw
Re: mail server w/ 65000++ users
> > For best performance have no direct TCP connections between your mail server > and the outside world. Have the MX records point to an inbound-relay which > sends the mail to the real server. hello :-) i pretty much dont get this part. what should be done is to point the MX record to another mail server ? what also confused me is, how does that server send the mail to the "real server" ? errr, did i ask the right question ? cheers, Chad
Re: mail server w/ 65000++ users
On Fri, 12 May 2000, Craig Sanders wrote: >On Fri, May 12, 2000 at 04:10:40PM +0800, Chad A. Adlawan wrote: >> does anybody have any URL's or docs w/ talks on how to build >> a mail server (both Exim and Sendmail are OK w/ me) with more >> than 65,000 users ? i.e., what are the available methods (and >> what are the best ones) of having mail users w/o having them on >> /etc/passwd. > >i'd suggest postfix + cyrus. from comments in the postfix-users list, it >seems to be a nearly ideal combination for doing what you want. I'd suggest Postfix + the Qmail POP server. Postfix (and Postfix-tls) are in Debian. There's a package of the Qmail source which allows you to compile your own Qmail POP server. Cyrus uses a different mail storage format to anything else and sequesters all your mail. For users who aren't in the /etc/passwd file use LDAP, give all users the same UID and with /dev/null as the shell (so they can't login). Use the NSS modules for LDAP. >hint, for performance you probably want to look at a machine with >multiple fast scsci drives for the mail spool (raid striping), formatted >with reiserfs. and lots of memory, of course. CPU speed isn't a big >issue - mail systems are I/O bound. Last year I was working on an AIX machine (AIX is slow) that had old 2G and 4G SSA drives (drive performance was less than my Thinkpad in every test). The AIX machine ran 27000 mail accounts, an Oracle server, and some shell accounts. After I had finished with it performance was quite OK. It really depends on the type of access the machine will get. 27000 university students don't produce much load (especially when most of them are arts students who only check mail once a week). 1000 people on a corporate network sending emails with Word and Excel documents attached will produce 1000 times the load. When mail is being delivered and immidiately downloaded via POP (no mail left on server) my Thinkpad 600E (10G IDE hard drive, Celeron 400) can do 20G of email traffic a day. An ISP with >50 users I know of has about 15G of email a day. For best performance have no direct TCP connections between your mail server and the outside world. Have the MX records point to an inbound-relay which sends the mail to the real server. Have the clients SMTP relay address point to a machine that's configured to just be an outbound relay. Have your server setup with ipchains or TCP wrappers to deny SMTP connections from machines other than the inbound relay. When mail comes from the Internet it generally comes in slowly, and in spurts. This hurts the caching on the queue partition. Have the mail come in from the inbound relay (or relays, you'll need several for a big system) in only a small number of TCP connections. That way data will generally never be read from the queue partition (it'll be in the cache). Have seperate physical media for the queue file system. All writes of email data are synchronous. Writing the queue data generally involves creating 2 or 3 queue files synchronously and one mail-store file (for maildir). This can make the queue a performance bottleneck for the mail system. Have a seperate pair of hard drives in RAID-1 setup for the queue and you'll save disk bandwidth for where you want it. Run bonnie++ (it's a Debian package) with the "-b" option to see how synchronous writes slow things down (you'll probably be surprised). Run zcav (part of the bonnie++ suite) on your hard drives to make sure that you only use the best performing parts in your RAID arrays. Run Postal (it's a Debian package) to test the overall performance of your mail delivery system, but note that it doesn't test the affects of slow transfers - it tests what you'll get when you have inbound and outbound relays. It's a Debian package, but the latest version is on Sourceforge and on http://www.coker.com.au/postal/ (the version in Debian is old). I think that a machine with 512M of RAM, Postfix, Qmail-POP, and two of the IBM 34G IDE hard drives in RAID-1 configuration running ReiserFS will provide all the performance you need (unless you've got the office email system with Word documents being mailed around). Test it out with Postal, if that hardware isn't enough then try two RAID-1 sets, one for queue and logs, the other for the mail data. Russell Coker PS I am the author of Postal and the primary author of the Bonnie++ suite. -- My current location - X marks the spot. X X X
Re: mail server w/ 65000++ users
On Fri, May 12, 2000 at 04:10:40PM +0800, Chad A. Adlawan wrote: > does anybody have any URL's or docs w/ talks on how to build > a mail server (both Exim and Sendmail are OK w/ me) with more > than 65,000 users ? i.e., what are the available methods (and > what are the best ones) of having mail users w/o having them on > /etc/passwd. i'd suggest postfix + cyrus. from comments in the postfix-users list, it seems to be a nearly ideal combination for doing what you want. both are packaged for debian. postfix is at http://www.postfix.org/ URL for cyrus should be in the package's documentation. i haven't used cyrus, but i'm a big fan of postfix - wouldn't use anything else these days, and i've tried all of the available MTAs over the last 5 or 6 years. hint, for performance you probably want to look at a machine with multiple fast scsci drives for the mail spool (raid striping), formatted with reiserfs. and lots of memory, of course. CPU speed isn't a big issue - mail systems are I/O bound. craig -- craig sanders
Re: mail server w/ 65000++ users
"Chad A. Adlawan" wrote: > i have this feeling that this has been asked b4 already but i cant locate > it in the archives. anyway : > > does anybody have any URL's or docs w/ talks on how to build a mail > server (both Exim and Sendmail are OK w/ me) with more than 65,000 users ? > i.e., what are the available methods (and what are the best ones) of having > mail users w/o having them on /etc/passwd. > > thanks in advance, > chad I think you need cyrus (?) as local delivery agent/pop server. Cross post your query to: news:comp.mail.sendmail and news:comp.mail.imap -- Andrzej (Andrew) A. Filip http://bigfoot.com/~anfi [EMAIL PROTECTED][EMAIL PROTECTED][EMAIL PROTECTED] Postings: http://deja.com/profile.xp?author=Andrzej%20Filip
Re: mail server w/ 65000++ users
Hi, perhaps have a look at qmail-ldap. You can manage all your users including quota and all that in your ldap directory and everything runs with a single UID. And you can run a cluster of POP-3 machines. BTW: gmx.net is running on qmail and they have 500k+ users. Torsten On Fri, 12 May 2000, Chad A. Adlawan wrote: > hello everyone, > > i have this feeling that this has been asked b4 already but i cant locate > it in the archives. anyway : > > does anybody have any URL's or docs w/ talks on how to build a mail > server (both Exim and Sendmail are OK w/ me) with more than 65,000 users ? > i.e., what are the available methods (and what are the best ones) of having > mail users w/o having them on /etc/passwd. > > thanks in advance, > chad > > > -- > To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] > with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED] > -- Media Online Internet Services & Marketing GmbH Torsten Krueger [EMAIL PROTECTED] fon: 49-231-5575100fax: 49-231-55751098 Ruhrallee 39 D-44137 Dortmund
