+--- In our lifetime, "John F. Kane" jkane@mitre.org wrote: | | We are configuring three F330s into our enterprise architecture | to serve /home data to our users. We currently use SparcServer | 1000s for this purpose. We are interested in how other | organizations are implementing UNIX mail in this situation. | Is it best to put /var/spool/mail on the NetApp filers or keep | it on the UNIX mail server?
Depends on how many accounts you have. Having a /var/spool/mail with 30,000 entries will definitely hurt performance. It also depends on how many boxes would be accessing the mail spool (locking issue). Also depends on what kind of mail volume you move.
This subject has been touched on quite a bit in the comp.mail.sendmail group. There are many ways of solving all the inherent problems, including delivery of mail to home dirs (savings on the STAT) as well as delivery to 1 file per message rather than 1 big mbox (saves on locks).
At my previous employer we went to an NFS mail architecture based on an f540 and a few pop and smtp boxes sitting in front of it. Worked very well (but there was alot of backend development work that went into the delivery mechanism). At the time we did have 100,000+ mail accounts... :) Check qmail for some additional info.