High availability mail server options

[Craig White]

On Tue, 2005-10-04 at 08:03 -0400, David Hollis wrote:
> For my company, I've setup a mail/groupware environment that uses
> Postfix, OpenLDAP, Postgres, Apache, etc and am now looking at ways to
> make it a more redundant arrangement.  All of the components have
> methods to help me with the lone exception of the backend mail storage
> for the end users.  Ultimately, I am wanting to have systems at
> different geographic locations, not even on the same network, ideally
> with users able to access any of them at anytime and be able to do their
> thing.  The users mail storage is in Maildir format which seems like it
> will help any replication type scenario.   I can't just NFS mount the
> mail directories, because then my NFS server becomes my single point of
> failure.  Do things like GFS work to handle this?  If so, do they
> operate across slow links (not talking dial-up here, but general
> Internet cable/DSL type links)
> 
> If it helps, our total mail volume is not that tremendous so completely
> instantaneous replication isn't totally necessary, but I would want
> fairly quick convergence (say 30 minutes or less).
> 
----
I think you will find that most IMAP servers aren't real keen on using
an NFS storage backend anyway. I can't conceive how maildir data store
has anything to do with replication. GFS would work - cyrus-imapd also
offers murder for a multi-server approach. Backup is always a bear on
these things that you have to consider.

Craig


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