From owner-freebsd-hackers Wed Mar 29 09:19:23 1995 Return-Path: hackers-owner Received: (from majordom@localhost) by freefall.cdrom.com (8.6.10/8.6.6) id JAA22309 for hackers-outgoing; Wed, 29 Mar 1995 09:19:23 -0800 Received: from seagull.rtd.com (root@Seagull.rtd.com [198.102.68.2]) by freefall.cdrom.com (8.6.10/8.6.6) with ESMTP id JAA22303 for ; Wed, 29 Mar 1995 09:19:22 -0800 Received: (from dgy@localhost) by seagull.rtd.com (8.6.9/8.6.9.1) id KAA08418; Wed, 29 Mar 1995 10:19:04 -0700 From: Don Yuniskis Message-Id: <199503291719.KAA08418@seagull.rtd.com> Subject: Re: Mail... To: taob@gate.sinica.edu.tw (Brian Tao) Date: Wed, 29 Mar 1995 10:19:02 -0700 (MST) Cc: freebsd-hackers@freefall.cdrom.com (FreeBSD hackers) In-Reply-To: from "Brian Tao" at Mar 30, 95 00:01:22 am X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Length: 1021 Sender: hackers-owner@FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk > >>> "Dick Bednar" said: > > > > My group is grappling blindly with the prospect of providing mail to 25,000 > > students. Sadly, our Unix experience is limited, and much of it is > > out-of-date. > > Eep. 25000 mail accounts == 25000+ entries in your /etc/passwd, > and 25000 files in /var/mail. Although you did not explicitly say all > 25000 mail accounts had to be on the same machine, I would recommend > splitting that up into different mail servers. Divide the students > into faculties or degree major or whatever. Then have a separate host > for each and tell the students which machine to use to retrieve mail. > If you want a consistent address for all the students, set up a > separate mailhost that routes incoming mail to the proper machine > based on a username lookup table. I don't really see any technical > problems with having 25000 mail accounts on one machine, but that can > mean a *hell* of a lot of disk space... Sounds like a *perfect* application for a compressing filesystem ;-)