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

Guy Waugh gwaugh at scu.edu.au
Mon Nov 27 05:03:56 CET 2006


Hi Kim, list,

Kim Hawtin wrote:
> Guy Waugh wrote:
>   
>> 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:
>>     
>
> ...
>
>   
>> Anyone suggest which directories I should be NFS sharing?
>>     
>
> How/where do you share the incoming mail list aliases that sendmail checks?
>   
> Also when you create a new list, how to you update the other hosts aliases?
>   
On each server, in the sendmail aliases file. So, when adding or 
removing a list, I have to do the alias changes on each of the two servers.

One thing I am a bit concerned about is contention on the shared files 
between the two servers. If, for example, both servers wanted to update 
the same .pck file at the same time, I'm not sure what would happen... 
would one server lock the file and the other server wait for the lock to 
be released, does anyone know? Or would chaos ensue?
> cheers,
>
> Kim
>   
Cheers,
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



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