file names = inodes : why?

1999-02-16 Thread Ari Rubenstein


On Tue, 16 Feb 1999, Harald Hanche-Olsen wrote:

> qmail needs inode numbers to generate unique message numbers.

This has come up a few times here (we are running qmail on a good number
of machines.)

Is the inode just a handy unique number?  Or are there file access
speed tricks, e.g. opening files directly using inode.

I would like it to be more convenient to manage the queue while mail is
being delivered...  :-)

- Ari

--
Ari Rubenstein  Unix ISA
Digex, West Coast   408-873-4256





Re: Back-up scheme, 2 qmail servers

1999-03-16 Thread Ari Rubenstein


On Tue, 16 Mar 1999, Eric Dahnke wrote:

> What do you mean by hold all the messages?
> 
> Our mailserver does both smtp and pop, so therein lies the problem. Great, so
> the MX rolls and the backup server accepts smtp for our domains. But what
> about pop? When the primary server comes back up, users would need to pop both
> servers to get all their mail, and that would turn into a mess.
> 
> Or am I not understanding.

I have one subdomain with something like this:

- primary mail server, has lower MX records, users, pop, imap, etc.

- secondary mail server, higher MX records, no users, no pop, etc.

If the primary mail server goes down, messages are queued on the backup
server.  This is accomplished by making the backup server a "null client"
as defined in the qmail FAQ.

When the primary server comes back online after a failure, the queued
messages on the backup server are delivered to the primary server.

Pop users would have an interuption in service, but no lost messages.

In the case of an extened outage of the primary server, you could build or
fall back to a entirely different primary server by changing the MX
records for your mail domain, and changing the qmail/control/smtproutes
file.

- Ari

----------
Ari Rubenstein  Unix Operations Engineer
Digex, West Coast   Sun Cert'd SysAdmin
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
408-873-4256