I've read various documents on mail servers and Netapps and other NFS servers etc, . but thought I would ask the question.
What MTA (sendmail, postfix, qmail, exim, etc.) have admins chosen to run and their reasoning if they would be open to sharing their feelings.
On Sat, Feb 07, 2004 at 01:08:31AM -0500, Errol Casey wrote:
I've read various documents on mail servers and Netapps and other NFS servers etc, . but thought I would ask the question.
What MTA (sendmail, postfix, qmail, exim, etc.) have admins chosen to run and their reasoning if they would be open to sharing their feelings.
We use Postfix and Maildir format for the mailboxes, using Courier-IMAP for IMAP and POP3 services.
Works like a champ for 30K accounts, the F760 involved doesn't really take much of a beating at all.
Mike, Would you care to share with us what is the Maximum Mail store quota that you guys allocate... on you F760?
We do a lot on email and we guess in the future we will be moving our mail stores onto something faster that having the queues, logs, mail store, split into 4 drives on SCSI160.
My concern of using a NAS is that you are still limited to 1Gbit ethernet... Our email system allows users to do searches for their mail boxes that will mean that the host will be pulling up 60MB of mail (in different files) of a NAS.
We have currently a few hundred users testing on the server and it is not an issue but we hope that "hk.com" will be reaching some serious numbers. The mail server is a single machine not multiple. The software we use does not allow us to split the MTA, web etc into different machines unless we pay some serious $$$'s.
I know a NAS would give us much better storage management however I think some SANs can I do to get some serious burst rates and be able to have multiple of these monster searches going in parallel.
What should we be doing... I have both various SAN and NAS options in stock on the shelf.
Thanks, Maren.
On Sat, 7 Feb 2004, Mike Horwath wrote:
On Sat, Feb 07, 2004 at 01:08:31AM -0500, Errol Casey wrote:
I've read various documents on mail servers and Netapps and other NFS servers etc, . but thought I would ask the question.
What MTA (sendmail, postfix, qmail, exim, etc.) have admins chosen to run and their reasoning if they would be open to sharing their feelings.
We use Postfix and Maildir format for the mailboxes, using Courier-IMAP for IMAP and POP3 services.
Works like a champ for 30K accounts, the F760 involved doesn't really take much of a beating at all.
-- Mike Horwath Admin & Manager @ VISI.com WORK: drechsau@visi.com IRC: Drechsau http://www.visi.com/ HOME: drechsau@geeks.org The only Minnesota ISP with public statistics: http://noc.visi.com/ Garbage In -- Gospel Out. - berkeley fortune(6)
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On Sun, Feb 08, 2004 at 02:26:54AM +0800, Maren S. Leizaola wrote:
Mike, Would you care to share with us what is the Maximum Mail store quota that you guys allocate... on you F760?
Standard is 35MB (we set to 40MB, though, but customers are told 35MB :).
Staff members are set up for 300MB, some of them have 500MB available.
We do a lot on email and we guess in the future we will be moving our mail stores onto something faster that having the queues, logs, mail store, split into 4 drives on SCSI160.
Well, keep the queues, logs on the local drives and use some decent RAID setups, like striping with mirroring, or RAID5 if the implementation is good enough.
Store the data on the NAS using Maildir format.
My concern of using a NAS is that you are still limited to 1Gbit ethernet... Our email system allows users to do searches for their mail boxes that will mean that the host will be pulling up 60MB of mail (in different files) of a NAS.
Okay...and?
60MB over Gbps ethernet isn't that much load in the grand scheme of things.
We have currently a few hundred users testing on the server and it is not an issue but we hope that "hk.com" will be reaching some serious numbers. The mail server is a single machine not multiple. The software we use does not allow us to split the MTA, web etc into different machines unless we pay some serious $$$'s.
Ack!
New software time...
Hi Errol!
yeah, i use postfix/maildir on my mailspools too ...
-- michael
On Sat, 07 Feb 2004, Errol Casey wrote:
I've read various documents on mail servers and Netapps and other NFS servers etc, . but thought I would ask the question.
What MTA (sendmail, postfix, qmail, exim, etc.) have admins chosen to run and their reasoning if they would be open to sharing their feelings.
-- Errol Casey errol@nouce.net
On Sat, 7 Feb 2004, Errol Casey wrote:
I've read various documents on mail servers and Netapps and other NFS servers etc, . but thought I would ask the question.
What MTA (sendmail, postfix, qmail, exim, etc.) have admins chosen to run and their reasoning if they would be open to sharing their feelings.
Errol on Wietses archives there is lots discussion on its use with Netapp. There is some major flames on super tuning for high speed relaying to achieve 300 messages relayed per second.
We don't use postfix on netapp but even on an intel box (IDE) it can handle some monster loads on relaying, rejecting unknown users etc.. We normally have about 1000 emails stuck in the queue for unknown destinations and it does not choke like Sendmail would...
The configuration of postfix as very easily understood.
One thing that Exim does is have some mad macro language to be able to put data into databases and be able to build your own smart logic into it Eg... Record in mysql the IP of any server that sends me email to unknown users, every time email delivery is attempted check the IP in the mysql if it has sent me more than x unknown users in the past hour reject the message... etc...
if you just need a good powerful email, steady, easy to manage. Postfix would be my choice.
Maren.
-- Errol Casey errol@nouce.net
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On Sat, Feb 07, 2004 at 01:08:31AM -0500, Errol Casey wrote:
I've read various documents on mail servers and Netapps and other NFS servers etc, . but thought I would ask the question.
What MTA (sendmail, postfix, qmail, exim, etc.) have admins chosen to run and their reasoning if they would be open to sharing their feelings.
The MTA is mostly irrelevant -- you wouldn't put your queues on a netapp would you? It's all about your LDA and POP/IMAP servers. You'll must run Maildir, or you'll be in for trouble. You'll want to run Maildir++. Using a hacked courier server, our pop servers can login and return a UIDL for a box with 50k messages in it in under a second. We also hacked procmail to do Maildir++.
On Sun, 8 Feb 2004, Kelsey Cummings wrote:
On Sat, Feb 07, 2004 at 01:08:31AM -0500, Errol Casey wrote:
I've read various documents on mail servers and Netapps and other NFS servers etc, . but thought I would ask the question.
What MTA (sendmail, postfix, qmail, exim, etc.) have admins chosen to run and their reasoning if they would be open to sharing their feelings.
The MTA is mostly irrelevant -- you wouldn't put your queues on a netapp would you?
I would! In fact that would be my number one reason for using a NetApp if I was running marketing mailing lists or carry high volumes of email.
When using postfix and queueing email through port 25 on a single scsi 160 disk you can get only 11 messages queued per second. Why? It when queing email the biggest bottle neck is how fast the drive can seek as it is very intensive on seeks. That is at least with the standard postfix (safe writing) configuration.
Also if you have a large backlog of a few thousand messages, if you run mailq, you will see the machine choke on a standard drive.
It's all about your LDA and POP/IMAP servers. You'll must run Maildir, or you'll be in for trouble. You'll want to run Maildir++. Using a hacked courier server, our pop servers can login and return a UIDL for a box with 50k messages in it in under a second. We also hacked procmail to do Maildir++.
That is pretty cool however after you load 50K messages in under a second you will find that bandwidth and the speed at which the client can process the headers is the biggest bottleneck. Still it is not a bad idea to be able to load in 1 second.
Maren.
-- Kelsey Cummings - kgc@sonic.net sonic.net, inc. System Administrator 2260 Apollo Way 707.522.1000 (Voice) Santa Rosa, CA 95407 707.547.2199 (Fax) http://www.sonic.net/ Fingerprint = D5F9 667F 5D32 7347 0B79 8DB7 2B42 86B6 4E2C 3896
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On Mon, Feb 09, 2004 at 06:18:26AM +0800, Maren S. Leizaola wrote:
On Sun, 8 Feb 2004, Kelsey Cummings wrote:
On Sat, Feb 07, 2004 at 01:08:31AM -0500, Errol Casey wrote:
I've read various documents on mail servers and Netapps and other NFS servers etc, . but thought I would ask the question.
What MTA (sendmail, postfix, qmail, exim, etc.) have admins chosen to run and their reasoning if they would be open to sharing their feelings.
The MTA is mostly irrelevant -- you wouldn't put your queues on a netapp would you?
I would! In fact that would be my number one reason for using a NetApp if I was running marketing mailing lists or carry high volumes of email.
When using postfix and queueing email through port 25 on a single scsi 160 disk you can get only 11 messages queued per second. Why? It when queing email the biggest bottle neck is how fast the drive can seek as it is very intensive on seeks. That is at least with the standard postfix (safe writing) configuration.
It seems to me that your better off using locally attached raid for mailqueues unless you really want the ability to share them between servers. We're using 3wares and raptors which are considerably more affordable - and faster - than using netapps, for mail queues. This also allows you to take specific measures in tuning your filesystem and raid for the task at hand.
It's all about your LDA and POP/IMAP servers. You'll must run Maildir, or you'll be in for trouble. You'll want to run Maildir++. Using a hacked courier server, our pop servers can login and return a UIDL for a box with 50k messages in it in under a second. We also hacked procmail to do Maildir++.
That is pretty cool however after you load 50K messages in under a second you will find that bandwidth and the speed at which the client can process the headers is the biggest bottleneck. Still it is not a bad idea to be able to load in 1 second.
It is cool. Of course bandwidth to the client is the real bottleneck but this provides clients with very low latency pop sessions -- no waiting for the server to build the UIDL, which on similar mbox or even Maildir stores could take minutes to provide -- leaving messages on the server is not a problem. Customer's don't stare at their client's waiting for it to finish 'authentication'.
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Errol Casey -
Kelsey Cummings -
Maren S. Leizaola -
Michael Galloway -
Mike Horwath