[Mailman-Users] Moving Lists
carconni
carconni at earthlink.net
Fri May 25 07:12:48 CEST 2007
Brad,
Thank you! It sounds like you've saved me a lot of heartache. We
have a Netapps that I was hoping to mount on the mail server and was
hoping I could avoid losing mail when the mail server ran into problems.
It's my understanding that the next version on Leopard will support
mail clustering so the solution I was looking for was somewhat
temporary. I'll have to give this a lot more thought.
On May 24, 2007, at 9:46 PM, Brad Knowles wrote:
> On 5/24/07, Brad Knowles wrote:
>
>> In short, I'd avoid this kind of solution like the plague, as far as
>> postfix is concerned. It may be okay to store certain types of user
>> mailboxes out on NFS (or other shared filesystem type), but not the
>> mail queues themselves.
>
> I should also say that most mailbox formats are not safe to store
> on NFS, or any other kind of typical shared filesystem. If you
> spend the really big bucks and you get Veritas VxFS (plus all their
> cluster-aware software) on big honking Sun Solaris servers, then
> you may be able to store them on a shared filesystem (if you do it
> right), but at that point I imagine you'd have enough money that
> you wouldn't need to be coming to us with questions.
>
> There are some mailbox formats that are supposedly safe to store on
> NFS, but even they have some issues and extra baggage that they
> bring to the table, and which I imagine you are probably not aware of.
>
>
> Of course, most NFS implementations would still leave you with a
> single-point-of-failure (SPOF), that being your NFS server.
>
> The only way to resolve that one is to go with a clustered NFS
> server solution, such as sold by the folks at Network Appliance.
> But those things are pretty damn bloody expensive, too. Even so,
> they're still a lot less expensive than solutions from the likes of
> EMC or Hitachi Data Systems.
>
>
> Now, if you're talking about a shared filesystem type that is
> anything but NFS, then you've got a whole 'nother Universe of
> problems.
>
> Yes, I know about GFS from what used to be Sistina (since bought by
> Red Hat), and I know one of their former senior architects -- he's
> been my co-author on some of the invited talks I've done, and I've
> been a technical reviewer of his book. I also know about things
> like Coda (or AFS), and a wide variety of other distributed
> filesystem solutions.
>
> No, I'm not going to buy any sales pitch regarding how they're the
> perfect solution for problems like this. If you want a real
> distributed cluster-aware filesystem for use with mail servers,
> then you're going to have to pay some real money. It's that simple.
>
> Veritas VxFS isn't necessarily the only solution here, but it is
> one of the best known. There are other alternatives in this space,
> but they are equally expensive. And no, Veritas VxFS on Linux is
> not the same as Veritas VxFS on Solaris.
>
>
> Since you're using Mailman on Mac OS X, I should also point out FAQ
> 1.21 and 1.29 at <http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py?
> req=show&file=faq01.021.htp> and <http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/
> faqw-mm.py?req=show&file=faq01.029.htp>.
>
> --
> Brad Knowles <brad at shub-internet.org>, Consultant & Author
> LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu>
> Slides from Invited Talks: <http://tinyurl.com/tj6q4>
>
> 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
>
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