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Date:      Mon, 29 Oct 2001 14:44:37 -0500 (EST)
From:      Francisco Reyes <lists@natserv.com>
To:        rcollins@hwi.buffalo.edu
Cc:        questions@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: redundant mail servers
Message-ID:  <20011029143732.C51234-100000@zoraida.natserv.net>
In-Reply-To: <1868.141.149.144.170.1000640220.squirrel@claven.hwi.buffalo.edu>

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On Sun, 16 Sep 2001 rcollins@hwi.buffalo.edu wrote:

> I'm looking to implement redundant mail servers. Load balancing would be
> *very nice* considering the cost of the hardware, but redundancy is the
> requirement.

Coming a bit late to the thread..
Forget about load balancing. Too expensive to do it correctly.
One way to go about it:
--Get yourself two machines, preferabley with SCSI since those drives are
more reliable. One will be your primary and the other your backup
--On each machine get 2 drives with removeable trays. 1 for OS second for
mail. Configure the machines simmilarly so you could mount your mail on
either machine.
--Run Rsync or Unison every 10 minutes from your primary machine to the
backup.

If your primary dies move the data drive to the second machine and change
it's IP.

If the primary Mail drive dies, move the mail disk from the second machine
to the primary machine.

Variations of this setup can get you even more redundancy such as getting
RAID instead of just single drives for the data drives.

You should also consider whether your pop program may have a problem with
rsync/unison when copying the data. We are working on preparing something
simmilar to what I described above and we are going with a commecial
program called communigate Pro. We were told that we should have no
problems copying the data to the secondary machine.


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