From owner-freebsd-isp@FreeBSD.ORG Wed May 11 18:55:25 2005 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-isp@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 25C5716A4CE for ; Wed, 11 May 2005 18:55:25 +0000 (GMT) Received: from pi.codefab.com (pi.codefab.com [199.103.21.227]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id D0D3743D6D for ; Wed, 11 May 2005 18:55:23 +0000 (GMT) (envelope-from cswiger@mac.com) Received: from localhost (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by pi.codefab.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id 3B7EA5E98; Wed, 11 May 2005 14:55:23 -0400 (EDT) Received: from pi.codefab.com ([127.0.0.1]) by localhost (pi.codefab.com [127.0.0.1]) (amavisd-new, port 10024) with ESMTP id 62671-04; Wed, 11 May 2005 14:55:22 -0400 (EDT) Received: from [192.168.1.3] (pool-68-161-53-96.ny325.east.verizon.net [68.161.53.96]) by pi.codefab.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id 4874F5CAF; Wed, 11 May 2005 14:55:21 -0400 (EDT) Message-ID: <42825514.60105@mac.com> Date: Wed, 11 May 2005 14:55:16 -0400 From: Chuck Swiger Organization: The Courts of Chaos User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.7) Gecko/20050414 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Mario Lopez References: <6.1.1.1.2.20050511200547.03d10418@mail.lar3d.com> In-Reply-To: <6.1.1.1.2.20050511200547.03d10418@mail.lar3d.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Virus-Scanned: amavisd-new at codefab.com cc: freebsd-isp@freebsd.org Subject: Re: File system mirroring for SMTP/POP Servers X-BeenThere: freebsd-isp@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.1 Precedence: list List-Id: Internet Services Providers List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Wed, 11 May 2005 18:55:25 -0000 Mario Lopez wrote: [ ...failover for POP... ] > I have read about file system mirroring over NFS but it looks like > something in development than a mature solution. This is a really hard problem domain to deal with. The reason why you see references to NFS is that people used to provide redundant mail spool access via NFS or one of the more complex network filesystems like AFS (which would provide read-write access, rather than read-only access in the case of the main server going down). Given that reading mail directly via an NFS-mounted spool predates remote mail access via POP/IMAP, I'm not convinced you're going to find a solution you consider "mature", so you might wish to re-evaluate this criteria. :-) How many hours of unexpected downtime has this mail server had over the past year? What is your budget? Are you willing to pay for a SAN and fibre channel connectivity for parallel mailreader boxes, rather than going the NAS route, then? -- -Chuck