If you were building Linux Mail servers...?(what hardware?)

[Pedro Fernandes Macedo]

Ron Henderson wrote:

>Hello there, 
>
>I am going to build a few Linux mail servers for testing purposes, and
>it is possible that I will roll them into production eventually.  
>
>So what hardware do you recommend? I am looking for 100% compatibility,
>and trouble free installation. I was thinking of using AMD MP's. What
>motherboard, NIC and RAID controllers just work with no issues?
>
>What Distro? Fedora? RH9, Suse?
>
>Cheers
>  
>
I'm a sysadmin at the computer science department of the university 
where I study and we have about 2000 users.

We're rebuilding the mail system now because our current system is based 
on only one machine ( 2.4Ghz P4 with 3 ide disks , 1Gb ram). It's load 
is always high , because the disks arent fast enough
to feed the imap server and then everything starts to fail... If the 
disks were faster , this machine would handle everything fine (it runs 
sendmail , spamassassin , UW imap , http and mailman on redhat 9). 
Normal load is 4.0 , but it raises to 8.0 during peak hours..

Here's what we are planning to do on our mailsystem:

Imap machine: 3 scsi disks , on a Adaptec ASC-29320 U320 scsi 
controller. Also we have a IDE disk where the OS is installed.
One scsi disk will be used to /var/spool/mail and the two others will be 
used to home dirs. The rest of the PC is pretty standard: P4 processor 
(2.8Ghz with hyperthreading , but a 1Ghz processor could do the trick , 
as this machine is more IO bound..) , Asus mobo (p4p800), 1 Gb ram...
It'll run Suse (my boss decision.. I started installing FC1 on it , but 
I had to install suse later..) , using courier imap (my boss again... 
I'd go for dovecot if I had the chance to give the orders).. It's 
working fine so far.. Next thursday I'll use some spammer tools to test 
the load this baby can handle before putting it online..

mailqueue : this is the slowest machine we'll have on our mail system.. 
It's already online, running Fedora Core 1 , on two IDE disks (some 
partitions on raid 0 , some on raid1)
It's a asus mobo with a 1.8ghz P4... 1Gb ram also.. It is also our tape 
machine that does remote backups of our mailserver and webserver using 
amanda. During backups , its load is about 0.3.
Normal load is about 0.02. The tape drive is a sony dds4 tape drive , 
using a adaptec u160 controller (dont remmember the model right now). 
Works perfectly.

Incoming smtp: we'll probably use our current mailserver for this.. It's 
a 2.4Ghz P4 with 3 ide disks , 1Gb ram and a Asus mobo. This machine 
will run amavis , postfix and spamassassin.

And two extra machines , one for webmail (using squirrelmail) and other 
for mailman...

So far , all the mentioned hardware is very trouble-free to setup using 
fedora or even suse (in the case of the P4P800 mobo , the only trouble 
was that I didnt know the name of the module
used by the onboard gigabit lan... it uses the sk98lin module, in case 
you need to know this... after finding the module , it works perfectly)

--
Pedro Macedo