Date: Thu, 13 May 1999 23:25:40 +0200 From: Tim Priebe <tim@iafrica.com.na> To: GVB <gvbmail@tns.net> Cc: freebsd-isp@freebsd.org Subject: Re: We are a growing ISP, need some advice! Message-ID: <373B4354.24F5@iafrica.com.na> References: <4.1.19990512085152.00b757e0@abused.com>
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GVB wrote: > > Hi there. I am a systems administrator for a small ISP in San Diego that is > rapidly growing. We offer basically all ISP services including dialup, > domain hosting, dedicated connections, etc. All of our servers are run off > of FreeBSD. > > Mail server is a PentiumII 233 with 384 megs of RAM running UW SCSI hard > drives. It is currently 2.2.8 with sendmail and Qpopper. > Our web server is a PentiumII 266 with 384 megs of RAM running UW SCSI hard > drives. It is currently 3.1 running Apache-ssl with Frontpage extensions. > > We have about 150 virtual domains running on the web server and about 800 > dialin accounts + the mail from all the virtual domains running off of that > one mail server. We are starting to see a definite need for a bigger > server farm. My question is, what should my growth point be from here, how > do I scale this thing to accomidate all the users and domains I am hosting, > because we are noticing the hardware starting to slow, the mail server > actually hits swap space, even with 384 megs of RAM in it. Your mail server is sufficiant, do not need to change your hardware, change your software. Replacing qpopper with something more efficiant will make a big differance. There are also very good replacements for sendmail that are more efficiant. > I have read up on doing round robin DNS with the Web Servers, but never > really understood how the disks are synched up, does it run on NFS with one > machine serving the content? Much easier to move some of the virtual domains to different servers. > How about scaling the mail servers? Where can I read up on setting up > multiple mail/pop3 servers? What is the best solution to do this. The easiest thing to start with is to separate your smtp server(s) from your pop server. The rewrites for the mail to the "virtual domains" can be handled on the smtp server. You will still need smtp on your pop server to receive mail. Although I have been thinking about making the "local delivery" agent on the smtp server deliver across a TCP connection to a local delivery agent on the pop server. This together with a well writen multi-threaded pop deamon should allow for a significant increase in the number of supported connections on a single pop server. Any thoughts on these ideas? Tim. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-isp" in the body of the message
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