Date: Wed, 04 May 2005 11:59:14 -0500 From: Paul Schmehl <pauls@utdallas.edu> To: "Matthias F. Brandstetter" <haimat@lame.at>, FreeBSD <freebsd-questions@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: installing big qmail server ... where to start? Message-ID: <8D1C2A81EF65E08642626856@utd49554.utdallas.edu> In-Reply-To: <200505041258.39573.haimat@lame.at> References: <200505041258.39573.haimat@lame.at>
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--On Wednesday, May 04, 2005 12:58:39 PM +0200 "Matthias F. Brandstetter"
<haimat@lame.at> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I have to plan and setup a mail solution for about 50.000 users, here are
> some key features requested by our customer:
>
> - self coded webfrontend w/ webmail and administration (filter, alias
> etc)
I'm not sure what you mean by self coded. Squirrelmail is a webmail front
end that meets the requirements you've mentioned. There are others as well.
- 100MB quota per user
I would recommend that you put the mailboxes on a separate partition -
perhaps even put var on a separate drive - and you should probably use
RAID0 at least.
> - autoresponder
> - about 50.000 user
> - online backup of data
Without knowing if you're local or remote, it's hard to say. I do backups
on a remote server using rsync to a local disk and rsync over ssh to a
remote disk. The local backups make it easy to restore something in a
pinch. The remote backups ensure that I don't lose data if the server
crashes and both disks are toast.
> - some more featuers for web frontend
Like what?
>
> Since I happily use qmail for some other (but smaller) installations, I
> want to try it with qmail here for this project as well. My only problem
> is, I have no clue where to start ... beginning from "should I use 2
> redundant and really strong or some more but cheaper servers?" to "which
> qmail distributions and patches should I use (ldap, mysql, ...)?" and
> "how to store data (mails) and do online backup w/o downtime?".
>
Mail servers have a lot of I/O so you should use SCSI disks, if possible.
RAID mirroring at least.
I think LDAP would make user admin a lot easier. Mysql would probably help
as well, given the number of users.
I'm not sure I know what you mean by "store data (mails). If you're using
qmail, set up IMAP and the mails are stored in maildir (I think). You can
create a virtual user so you don't have to have /home/{uid} for all 50,000
users.
Surely there's a doc on the web that walks you through all of this? No
sense in reinventing the wheel.....
Paul Schmehl (pauls@utdallas.edu)
Adjunct Information Security Officer
The University of Texas at Dallas
AVIEN Founding Member
http://www.utdallas.edu
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