On Mon, Sep 30, 2002 at 05:41:43PM +0100, David Lee wrote:
We run a fairly traditional UNIX email service: delivery to a Solaris-8 machine with sendmail, hosting the "/var/mail" mailstore. The operations on the mailstore files themselves are entirely from the Washington suite: POP/IMAP server (clients) and their "tmail" (sendmail 'Mlocal' delivery). There is no direct NFS access to the mailstore.
One of the pieces of received wisdom is that the "/var/mail" mailstore should not be accessed by NFS, as NFS is (they would say) notoriously problematical. I'm inclined to believe this.
Nevertheless, we are toying with the idea of putting "/var/mail" onto a NetApp thereby, of course, introducing NFS and its locking into the equation. Naturally, we are rather wary of doing this. But, if done, its major advantage for us would be in allowing us to set up an expandable "farm" of modest-size IMAP/POP machines, rather than having to run it all on one major machine.
Anyone got any thoughts and/or experiences with UNIX /var/mail on NetApp?
It does work as long as all of your clients can do locking.
But it is not as fast as you might be hoping for :(
What we did was move away from mbox format mailboxes into Maildir format mailboxes which removes locking issues.
Works very very well, but unfortunately, if you do not want to change software, this won't be a solution for you.
We ran /var/mail on an F720 years ago and it worked until we saturated the poor F720. Took about 3 months :)