[28956] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: pop server in an ISP environment
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (ww@shadowfax.styx.org)
Fri May 26 13:39:08 2000
From: ww@shadowfax.styx.org
To: nanog@merit.edu
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Fri, 26 May 2000 09:58:14 EDT."
<20000526095814.A20167@mindspring.net>
Date: Fri, 26 May 2000 13:31:26 -0400
Message-Id: <20000526173127.7226A7469@shadowfax>
Errors-To: owner-nanog-outgoing@merit.edu
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>>>>> "John" == John Butler <john.butler@netrail.net> writes:
John> Thus spake Muljawan Hendrianto
John> (muljawan.hendrianto@siemens.com.sg):
>> 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 \________
ww@shadowfax.styx.org\____________________________
Idiosyntactix Ministry of Research and Development\
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