Best solution for mail server?

[Les Mikesell]

Henning Larsen wrote:
> Hello.
> 
> On Wed, 2008-02-20 at 23:26 +1030, Tim wrote:
> 
>> In my rc.local files I have lines like the following (below).  And each
>> user has their ~/.fetchmailrc file set for whatever servers their
>> accounts will poll.
>>
>> su tim -c "/usr/bin/fetchmail -d 900"
>> su john -c "/usr/bin/fetchmail -d 1200"
>> su jane -c "/usr/bin/fetchmail -d 1500"
>>
>> I picked different polling periods so that mail runs will not run at the
>> same time as each other (spreading the workload around).  Any user can
>> stop their own automatic poll, and restart it, if they want to.
>>
>> I only roughly picked different time periods, if I really wanted to
>> ensure that they hardly ever ran at the same time, I'd have used prime
>> numbers.  But I'm too lazy to bother to work out large prime numbers,
>> and I don't think it's that important for me.  It'd be different if you
>> had a large number of users, then it might be quite beneficial.
> 
> Thank you Tim, and others.
> 
> The .fetchmailrc files is now in users home dirs. They are owned by
> root, and they contain passwords.
> Should I change owners of the files and put passwords somewhere else?
> 
> About what you said about primes, I don't follow.
> if polls happen every 11 and 13 minute they will crash every 11x13 min.
> if polls happen every 10 and 12 minute they will crash every 10x12 min.
> as long as the numbers not divide to whole numbers like 6 and 12 does it
> will be the same. But primes ensure that situation never happend, am I
> right?

There's no reason for 2 instances of fetchmail running at the same time 
to crash as long as they aren't logging in as the same user on the 
remote side.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com