advice needed, strange mail arrangement desired

[Jeff Kinz]

On Tue, Oct 24, 2006 at 02:17:14PM -0700, Rick Stevens wrote:
> On Tue, 2006-10-24 at 13:56 -0400, Jeff Kinz wrote:
> > On Tue, Oct 24, 2006 at 10:32:24AM -0700, Rick Stevens wrote:
> > > On Tue, 2006-10-24 at 12:37 -0400, Jeff Kinz wrote:
> > Hi Rick! :-)
> 
> Hi, yourself!
> 
> > Both machines are at the same public IP with the server/firewall getting
> > all the port 25 traffic.  The desktop machine is not visible from the
> > internet.  Are you saying I should forward all port 25 traffic to the
> > desktop during its working hours and then keep port 25 at the server
> > whenever the desktop is down? Then have the server sendmail just keep
> > retrying delivery until the desktop comes back up? That may actually be 
> > doable....   Needs a heartbeat and failover script.
> 
> That sure would work.  Another thing is to simply have the server set
> up as the MX for your domain all the time and add appropriate entries
> in the user database to forward the mail directly to your desktop when
> it comes up.  So, the mail sent to "fred at bedrock.com" comes to the
> laptop.  The laptop transforms it to "fred at desktop.bedrock.com" and
> _tries_ to forward it to "desktop".  It's down, so it keeps retrying
> until it comes up.  And Bob's your uncle!  That's what a spooler is
> for.

umm, gee thats a lot less work than developing a set of heartbeat and
failover scripts, isn't it?... :-) 

No, I want to do it hard way........ NOT!


Rick, thats exactly what I need.  

> Do you get tons of mail while the desktop is off?  I ask because the
> actual TCP transfer of mail is reasonably slow and the performance of
> the disk probably wouldn't be an issue--you'd be more I/O bound from
> the network side rather than the storage side.  The size of the disk may
> be a problem if you do get lots of mail however.

Well, I do get most of my spam when Asia is up and working... :-) but - 
The real issue is accessing mail.  What used to take mutt a few seconds
to open on my big honkin SATA desktop drives can take 3 to 5 minutes on this poor
little lappy.  since I'll be working from my desktop anyway, it makes
sense to have the mail files and mail client there as well.

To make things even more painful, whenever mutt tries to update, it can
take the same 3-5 minutes of ignoring the keyboard to do that before I
can get it back to what I want it doing.

The ironic part is the laptop has a 2.1 GHz CPU and the desktop's is
1.17 Ghz.

> > (I much prefer select to poll.. :-) )
> 
> Unless you have the kernel bug that causes select() calls to not return
> if you hit the "magic window" around midnight GMT.  :-)  I don't think
> Linux ever had that bug, but BSD and Solaris did for a long time!

heh - just the thing for a cabal of witches!

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