Mail Message Replication.
Guys, I'm considering building a replicated mail service. If the primary goes down for any reason (software or hardware), I need to be able to switch over to the backup service, simply by changing the MX. Minimal mail should therefore be lost or bounced and customers will not inconvenienced when we try to fix a disk or whatever. Is there any software already which will allow this to be done. I have had a quick scan at the qmail archives, but that didn't really turn anything up. The main issues are really "how to replicate imcoming messages" and "how to replicate POP3 transactions", though I'm sure it's a bit more involved than that. Thanks for any help or advice you can give, regarding this matter. Regards, Richard Aldridge, Internet Systems Engineer, Cable Internet.
Now running qmail on all our servers! Hoorah!
Finally, we are running qmaiil on all our mail servers, so thanks to everyone here who has helped me figure stuff out. It's mostly going ok, and there were no major customer hassles after the switchover. We have noticed that performance has increased dramatically. We are using inhouse LDAP patches to do our user/password lookups, so I will post our patches when our site has been cleaned up (They are nothing on the scale of Andres though, but they may be useful to someone), and we are over any teething problems. We did have one issue by the way, and I'm curious if anyone else has experienced this. We are running the main mail server on Linux. When we tried to upgrade before, I found that qmail-popup sessions were not timing out. This time around I found (with strace) that the select call in timeoutread and timeoutwrite was counting down to zero, but then it was resettting to the original timeout value somehow. So, it would never exit! At the moment I have made a hack to fix this, but I really need to know if there is a "proper" solution to this issue. I can post more details if anyone wants. Regards, Richard Aldridge, Internet Systems Engineer, Cable Internet.
Mailboxes.
Hi once again guys, Thanks for all the help you've given me in the past few weeks. I do, however, have another issue with mailbox conversion. After direction from this list I have looked at both Russ's and Bruce Guenter's scripts for converting mailboxes to maildirs. Both are mostly suitable, though there is a slight problemo. At our site (currently using sendmail, but the plan is to move it to qmail) customers have a tendency to leave very old mail on the server. That is, once it's been read by their POP3 client, they elect to leave the mail on the server, instead of deleting it. Whilst under qmail, messages which have been read and are to be left on the server are moved from the "new" directory to the "cur" directory, this is not the case with mailbox-based POP3 servers. It would be very useful if, when converting mailboxes to maildirs, I could do a search for a tag/line of some sort, which says that a message has been seen by POP3 already, so then I could automatically write messages which have not been read yet to the "new" (qmail) directory, and write seen messages to the "cur" directory. The current scripts to do this move all messages into the "new" directory. I know that qpopper writes "X-UIDL:" and "Status" lines, but other POP3 servers may not. An example of this would be that previous to the qpopper server we are using now, zpop was used, and perhaps others were used before that, both of which may write lines to the mailbox, or even may not. The reasoning behind this is that when we switch over to our new qmail server, we don't want the load to go through the roof because customers spend all their time downloading mail messages to read, which they had previously seen under the other system, i.e. because they were now all placed in the "new" directory. I was also wondering on the best way to physically copy existing mailboxes over, before they are transformed into maildirs. Presently, we have about 13Gb of mail, and the options are tape or network. If we run a script which filters old mail from new, we could even leave the old messages on the old server "just in case" the customers really really want them, and only copy the new ones over. Thanks for any help on the above matters, Regards, Rich Aldridge, Internet Systems Engineer, Cable Internet.
Mail without To: line.
This isn't really a qmail question, more mail in general. I received an email with the following header. Although it was "Received: for [EMAIL PROTECTED]", it doesn't have a "To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]" line ?! Or maybe I'm missing something. Any ideas anyone ? Thanks, Richard Aldridge. Received: from tigers.cableinet.net (tigers.cableinet.net [193.38.113.20]) by lions.cableinet.net (950413.SGI.8.6.12/951211.SGI) via SMTP id QAA13433 for [EMAIL PROTECTED]; Fri, 22 Jan 1999 16:53:51 GMT From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Received: (qmail 197 invoked from network); 22 Jan 1999 16:50:57 - Received: from baloo.pipex-sa.net (196.22.64.66) by tigers.cableinet.net with SMTP; 22 Jan 1999 16:50:57 - Received: from rmbam.co.za [196.11.197.7] by baloo.pipex-sa.net with esmtp (Exim 1.59 #1) id 103jtE-0005Ty-00; Fri, 22 Jan 1999 18:57:00 +0200 Received: from RMBAM/SpoolDir by rmbam.co.za (Mercury 1.31); 22 Jan 99 18:58:39 SAST-2 Received: from SpoolDir by RMBAM (Mercury 1.31); 22 Jan 99 18:58:12 SAST-2 Received: from VA5ryisB5 by rmbam.co.za (Mercury 1.31); 22 Jan 99 18:57:59 SAST-2 DATE: 22 Jan 99 8:39:57 AM Message-ID: T87SA38yqR6n23nbq SUBJECT: Maximize your website traffic. X-Mozilla-Status: 8001 X-Mozilla-Status2: X-UIDL: bc96001b4ab82c667042b35c7c2aa1bd
HELP ! qmail-pop3d not timing out.
Hi,
I am having a few problems getting qmail-pop3d to time out. I was
wondering if anyone else has had similar problems and could help me out.
Once again, I imagine it is something I have set up wrongly in my qmail
or tcpserver configuration. I have tried setting the tcpserver timeout
to 180 seconds but this does not seem to make a difference in this case.
I have also modified my versions of saferead() and safewrite() both in
qmail-pop3d and qmail-popup to timeout after 300 seconds (Don't tell
Dan!), but again this doesnt seem to have any effect.
Thanks in advance for any help,
Regards,
Richard Aldridge,
Systems Engineer,
Cable Internet.
p.s. Some more info which might help :
Running Slackware 3.5 Kernel 2.0.35
# pstree -ahupl | grep pop
| |-grep(17220) pop
|-tcpserver(13432) -P -H -R 0 pop3 /var/qmail/bin/qmail-popup
tigers.cableinet.net /bin/checkpassword ...
| |-qmail-popup(17158) tigers.cableinet.net /bin/checkpassword
/var/qmail/bin/qmail-pop3d Maildir
| | `-qmail-pop3d(17198,mailuser) Maildir
| |-qmail-popup(20447) tigers.cableinet.net /bin/checkpassword
/var/qmail/bin/qmail-pop3d Maildir
| | `-qmail-pop3d(20490,mailuser) Maildir
| |-qmail-popup(21815) tigers.cableinet.net /bin/checkpassword
/var/qmail/bin/qmail-pop3d Maildir
| | `-qmail-pop3d(21880,mailuser) Maildir
| |-qmail-popup(16778) tigers.cableinet.net /bin/checkpassword
/var/qmail/bin/qmail-pop3d Maildir
| | `-qmail-pop3d(16794,mailuser) Maildir
| `-qmail-popup(19440) tigers.cableinet.net /bin/checkpassword
/var/qmail/bin/qmail-pop3d Maildir
| `-qmail-pop3d(19482,mailuser) Maildir
# strace -p 20490
oldselect(2, NULL, [1], NULL, {241, 12} unfinished ...
# strace -p 20490
oldselect(2, NULL, [1], NULL, {236, 46} unfinished ...
