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Date:      Sun, 21 Nov 2004 16:42:22 -0800
From:      Tabor Kelly <tkelly-freebsd-questions@taborandtashell.net>
To:        Evan Sayer <esayer1@san.rr.com>, freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Diskless Servers
Message-ID:  <41A135EE.5040601@taborandtashell.net>
In-Reply-To: <6E5CDC16-3BE5-11D9-8AB7-000A95CCF8C4@san.rr.com>
References:  <6E5CDC16-3BE5-11D9-8AB7-000A95CCF8C4@san.rr.com>

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Evan Sayer wrote:
> Hello-
> Is it a good idea to run a mail server or web server diskless?  The 
> reason I want to do this is so that all of our server's files will be in 
> one place which will make backups more convenient.  Basically I am 
> thinking of running one NFS/TFTP file server with disks, and those disks 
> will contain the partitions for a web server, a mail server, and a login 
> server which will all boot diskless.  Is this safe and ok performance 
> wise?  Thanks.

So, mbox format mail files can not be run over NFS because NFS does not 
implement posix standard file locking. You could run courier or qmail 
with maildir however. I use a patched version of qmail (and I love it), 
your can read about my experiences here (please note, I haven't quite 
finished this document yet and it is still a little rough around the 
edges): (http://tabor.taborandtashell.net/serversetup/qmail.html).

As for a web server, I don't know of any file locking problems, although 
for some specific implementations I would presume that they would pop up 
(ex: anything to do with a Berkley DB).

So, in short the answer to your question is: depends.

Note: I am not an expert unix system administrator, nor have I ever had 
a disk less server, I have however been monkeying with unix for about 8 
years now.



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