From owner-freebsd-isp Thu Oct 7 17:29:53 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-isp@freebsd.org Received: from richard2.pil.net (richard2.pil.net [207.8.164.9]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 7494714BB7 for ; Thu, 7 Oct 1999 17:29:44 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from up@pil.net) Received: (qmail 6840 invoked by uid 1825); 8 Oct 1999 00:28:43 -0000 Date: Thu, 7 Oct 1999 20:28:43 -0400 (EDT) From: X-Sender: up@richard2.pil.net To: Deepwell Internet Cc: freebsd-isp@freebsd.org Subject: Re: NetApp servers In-Reply-To: <4.2.0.58.19991007152026.02f2f9d0@mail1.dcomm.net> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-isp@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org If you're looking for reliability with NFS, check out qmail with Maildir. It solves the locking issues, but on a really large scale, it may bring up inode issues. Nonetheless, I believe it's still what Hotmail uses. On Thu, 7 Oct 1999, Deepwell Internet wrote: > The Earthlink whitepaper is at > http://www.earthlink.net/about/papers/mailarch.html > > but I agree. It looks like a cheezy hack. > > > Can anyone point me to good documentation of building highly scalable web > servers or mail servers? I'd like to explore some different designs and > look at how they scale and increase reliability. > > I noticed that Geocities offers all user pages at > www.geocities.com/~username. How do you suppose they are implementing > this? A large Sun box or two with NFS? > > > At 11:51 PM 10/7/99 +0200, you wrote: > >Damian Hamill wrote: > > > > > Can anyone put any figures on what it costs to install and run a large > > > scale email service (say > 10,000 users) using a NetApp file server, > > > i.e. what are the real costs in terms of all the hardware components > > > and also how many man hours per month to look after it etc. Any real > > > life examples out there ? > > > >Very expensive, since all mail software needs to lock files it's writing > >to. NFS is stateless, a lock is state information, so by design any > >implementation of such is already a gross hack. > > > >I suggest getting a RAID controller, preferably a SCSI-SCSI one. Cost is > >about a third of a NetApp. If you really want a purple box in your racks > >use them to store web pages or user home directories (i.e. stuff you need > >on several machines at the same time and that will hardly be written to). > > > >EarthLink do run mail on NetApps. They have a white paper somewhere on > >their website describing their setup (which involves some hacks in local > >delivery agents and POP3 daemons to work around the locking issue). > > > > > > -- Niels. > > > > > > > >To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org > >with "unsubscribe freebsd-isp" in the body of the message > > > > To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org > with "unsubscribe freebsd-isp" in the body of the message > James Smallacombe PlantageNet, Inc. CEO and Janitor up@3.am http://3.am ========================================================================= ISPF 3 - The Forum for ISPs by ISPs(tm) || Nov 15-17, 1999, New Orleans 3 days of clues, news, and views from the industry's best and brightest. Visit for information and registration. ========================================================================= To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-isp" in the body of the message