[Summary] Mail Server Plan & SDS 4.0
2007-12-25 10:50:00
Sorry for my late summary. Thanks for following
admins:
David M. Davisson <davisson@emuni.com>
David Fetrow <fetrow@biostat.washington.edu>
Greg Ness <nessgr@cit.org>
Jim Harmon <jharmon@telecnnct.com>
Kevin Sheehan <Kevin.Sheehan@uniq.com.au>
Michael Pavlov <misha@ml.com>
Tom Jordan <Thomas.Jordan@East.Sun.COM>
My Question:
-----------------------------------------------------------
In my department( Sparc, Solaris 2.5.1), only one
mail server, all other workstation mount their
/var/mail from mail server.
My qyestion, in case the mail server down,
all workstation will hang.
How can I avoid this ?
Furthermore, I plan to install SDS 4.0 on
this mail server, hope more reliable ..
What different between SDS4.0 and SDS4.1 ?
-----------------------------------------------------------
Answer :
David M. Davisson <davisson@emuni.com>
--------------------------------------
Don't mount /var/mail at clients. You should be running sendmail with a POP3
host program so that users can retrieve their mail privately and in a secure
manner.
David Fetrow <fetrow@biostat.washington.edu>
--------------------------------------------
One possibility is using pop (or better: imap) to retrieve email
instead of NFS....email is delivered to the user only when they ask
for it rather than having the email disk mounted all the time.
See http://imap.cac.washingon.edu/
Another is to use automounter for /var/spool/mail
Another is to restrict mail clients to a single machine; the machine
with /var/spool/mail.
Greg Ness <nessgr@cit.org>
--------------------------
Sounds like you have the clients doing a 'direct' mount of their
/var/mail directory. I would try an 'indirect' mount or link.
vr,
greg
Jim Harmon <jharmon@telecnnct.com>
----------------------------------
Change the NFS mount information for teh /var/mail dir to SOFT and
AUTOmount, so that the systems won't crash if the NFS export fails.
Kevin Sheehan <Kevin.Sheehan@uniq.com.au>
-----------------------------------------
By replicating the data in /var/mail via the network. We have a product
called UPFS that does exactly this. Check out our web page at
http://www.uniq.com.au, or you can mail us on upfs-info@uniq.com.au
for more information.
Michael Pavlov <misha@ml.com>
------------------------------
Using automounter with configured NFS client automounter failover
might do the jobs.
Another thing to look into is round robin DNS lookup and MX records.
Please summarize.
BTW. what's SDS ?
Tom Jordan <Thomas.Jordan@East.Sun.COM>
---------------------------------------
You can mount /var/mail with a timeout option or mount it "soft" instead of
"hard". Look at the mount manpage for the options.
It is my impression that 4.1 is more stable than 4.0,
but I don't think that there are major changes. I think 4.1 is basically
4.0 with some patches.
My Feedback :
==============
Option 1) Using pop3/imap for receive email, but most of our user still using
mailtool and Zmail
Option 2) Use automount and soft mount. But from man page (below), I not
recommend use soft mount.
-------------------------------------------------------
File systems that are mounted read-write or that con-
tain executable files should always be mounted with the
hard option. Applications using soft mounted file sys-
tems may incur unexpected I/O errors.
--------------------------------------------------------
My finial dicision is use auto mounter and auto_direct, option is
/var/mail -rw,soft,noac,actimeo=0 mail-server:/var/mail
Best regards,
Man Wu
Comments
Got something to say?
You must be logged in to post a comment.
