[Mailman-Users] Load-balancing mailman between two servers

[Guy Waugh]

Hi there,

I run Mailman 2.1.9 on two load-balanced RHEL3 servers. The load
balancer is an LVS director (http://www.linuxvirtualserver.org), a layer
4 software load balancer. The load balancer balances requests to
sendmail on the two RHEL3 servers, and to apache running the Mailman web
interface. Because of this, there's no guarantee that a user will hit
the Mailman web interface on the same server as the one that has
received an email for a Mailman list. I do this load balancing for
redundancy, not for load; this way, I can bring down one of the two
servers at any time and the Mailman service is still maintained.

By the way, I've been doing this since Mailman 2.1.5, and from that
time, I've had the archives, data and lists directories on an NFS-shared
disk, like this:

[root at slap mailman-prod]# pwd
/usr/local/inst/mailman-2.1.9
[root at slap mailman-prod]# ls -al
total 72
drwxrwsr-x   18 mailman  mailman      4096 Oct  6 14:26 .
drwxr-xr-x   16 root     root         4096 Oct  9 10:26 ..
lrwxrwxrwx    1 root     mailman        35 Oct  6 14:25 archives ->
/var/mailman-share/mailman-archives
drwxrwsr-x    2 root     mailman      4096 Oct  6 14:28 bin
drwxrwsr-x    2 root     mailman      4096 Oct  6 14:28 cgi-bin
drwxrwsr-x    2 root     mailman      4096 Oct  9 09:00 cron
lrwxrwxrwx    1 root     mailman        31 Oct  6 14:25 data ->
/var/mailman-share/mailman-data
drwxrwsr-x    2 root     mailman      4096 Oct  6 14:27 icons
lrwxrwxrwx    1 root     mailman        32 Oct  6 14:25 lists ->
/var/mailman-share/mailman-lists
drwxrwsr-x    2 root     mailman      4096 Aug 13  2004 local-data
drwxrwsr-x    2 root     mailman      4096 Nov 23 12:04 locks
drwxrwsr-x    2 root     mailman      4096 Sep  9  2005 logs
drwxrwsr-x    2 root     mailman      4096 Oct  6 14:28 mail
drwxrwsr-x   11 root     mailman      4096 Oct  6 14:27 Mailman
drwxrwsr-x   34 root     mailman      4096 Oct  6 14:28 messages
drwxrwsr-x    6 root     mailman      4096 Jun 29  2004 pythonlib
drwxrwsr-x   11 root     mailman      4096 Jun 30  2004 qfiles
drwxrwsr-x    2 root     mailman      4096 Oct  6 14:49 scripts
drwxrwsr-x    2 root     mailman      4096 Jun 29  2004 spam
drwxrwsr-x   37 root     mailman      4096 Oct  6 14:28 templates
drwxrwsr-x    4 root     mailman      4096 Oct  6 14:28 tests

I'm wondering if there are any other directories that I should be
sharing between the two servers? I'm particularly thinking of the qfiles
directory, but basically, I guess I should be NFS-sharing any
directories that contain dynamic data that could be required by actions
arising from Mailman cron jobs (which only run on one of the two
servers) or from actions arising from the web interface.

Anyone suggest which directories I should be NFS sharing?

Thanks,
Guy.

-- 
Guy Waugh
Unix System Administrator
IT&TS, Southern Cross University
Lismore, NSW, Australia
Email: gwaugh at scu.edu.au
Ph.: +61 2 6620 3196
Fax: +61 2 6620 3033