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Re: pop server in an ISP environment

  • From: ww
  • Date: Fri May 26 13:40:09 2000

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>>>>> "John" == John Butler <[email protected]> writes:


    John>         Thus        spake         Muljawan        Hendrianto
    John> ([email protected]):
    >> Another issue  is high availability,  does any body  use server
    >> clustering in an ISP environment?  I am thinking about having a
    >> Sun Cluster for these pop servers, but will I need a special HA
    >> agent ?

    John> Stick a  bunch of them behind a server  load balancer like a
    John> Foundry  ServerIron or an F5.  Then you don't  have to worry
    John> about  who the  server vendor is.  Then you can  use FreeBSD
    John> boxen for the servers and save a chonka dough.

A solution that is cheaper yet  is to have the servers speak a routing
protocol and announce their presence  into it that way (see the recent
"IGPs and services?" thread on this list). You can do it all with free
software and commodity hardware.

The big  issue here is the  back  end -- if users may connect to, say,
one of four pop3 servers  to read their mail, the /var/mail filesystem
had better be shared in some way. The easy way to do this is with NFS,
but if  each of the pop3  servers has a  100Mb ethernet card in  it it
could easily  swamp an NFS server.  Perhaps some way  to have multiple
mail   spool  filesystems   --   foo  and   bar's   mail  spools   are
/var/mail/f/foo and /var/mail/b/bar where /var/mail/(f|b) are separate
filesystems  mounted from different NFS servers.

Cheers,
- -w
- --
Will Waites \________
[email protected]\____________________________
Idiosyntactix Ministry of Research and Development\

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