Date: Tue, 20 Jun 2006 15:15:28 +0100 From: Brian Candler <B.Candler@pobox.com> To: Francisco Reyes <lists@stringsutils.com> Cc: FreeBSD ISP <freebsd-isp@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: NFS automounting. Stable for mail servers? Message-ID: <20060620141528.GA5731@uk.tiscali.com> In-Reply-To: <cone.1150752241.247354.72343.5001@35st-server.simplicato.com> References: <cone.1150752241.247354.72343.5001@35st-server.simplicato.com>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
On Mon, Jun 19, 2006 at 05:24:01PM -0400, Francisco Reyes wrote: > Our setup has a number of front end mail machines accesing nfs servers. > To distribute the load we create directories like > /mail-server1 > /mail-server2 > /mail-server3 > > Each of the front end machines mounts all the servers from fstab. Problem > with that is that if loading from fstab if one of the nfs servers freezes > the front end machines may have problems while trying to access the downed > nfs server. That's true, but you'd want to be a bit careful with an automounter; you don't want your MTA to create /mail-server1/u/s/username/Maildir on the front-end's local disk if /mail-server1 was not mounted! What would you expect the front-end to do if a user whose mail is on /mail-server1 connects, but /mail-server1 is down? You could add a check to the application code to check for this case. Or, perhaps more simply, you could just use a 'soft mount' for NFS, and let it fail. I've not tested this myself. I've built clusters around Netapps and they are too reliable :-) As for automount, I don't use that either, but I wouldn't expect much problem if you were just auto-mounting /mail-server1, /mail-server2, /mail-server3 and leaving them mounted. I expect the problems you refer to are when user1 connects and you automount /mail-server1/u/s/user1/ (that is, thousands of automounts and unmounts taking place all the time) Regards, Brian.
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?20060620141528.GA5731>