Date: Wed, 28 Jan 1998 10:05:35 -0600 (CST) From: James Wyatt <jwyatt@rwsystr.RWSystems.net> To: Damian Hamill <damian@cablenet.net> Cc: lamaster@george.arc.nasa.gov, freebsd-isp@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Sendmail - low on space Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.3.91.980128092308.30191B-100000@rwsystr.RWSystems.net> In-Reply-To: <34CEFC16.33590565@cablenet.net>
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On Wed, 28 Jan 1998, Damian Hamill wrote:
> The problem is that you can't plan for a user receiving a 28MB email, or
> maybe 10 users getting a 28MB email!!
>
> Having the mail spool on the /var partition was probably OK in the days
> of small text only emails but attachments make it impossible to plan any
> kind of mail queue disk usage. The safest thing is to put it on a
> partition with the largest amount of free disk space.
Yes, it should be on a big filesystem, often its own filesystem. Disks
are cheaper than help desk calls. I remember the first time I got a NeXT
box for a uucp peer and saw this 700KB lump betwixt all the 1KB ones. 08{)
This is why I usually add a /var and /usr on servers or shared machines,
but I don't add them on client nodes. I just answer 'OK' to the warning
about no /var or /usr. (IMHO client nodes can use IMAP anyway... ) I
don't mind the warnings, but would hate to be locked-out of using it.
btw: One of our customers uses a 500MB /var/spool/mail filesystem. We had
user send a 44MB MIME message that that filled a disk at another company.
That sendmail sent us bounce messages saying 'disk full, burp' and sending
26MB of it back to us ... and their postmaster ... every 30 min! We ran
short on space on the MX box when the Lotus Message Snitch(tm) downstream
choked on the quantity. Nothing went down but webmaster and postmaster
mail.
James Wyatt (jwyatt@rwsystems.net, jim@rwsys.lonestar.org) KA5VJL
ObDeepThought: Do optimists lock their cars?
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