Distributed File Systems

[Paul Dekkers]

Hi,

I haven’t looked at these filesystems so closely, but I want at around
the same thing as you I guess: if the “main” imap-server fails, let
another one take over the job (e.g. with IP takeover).

In my opinion maybe the NNTP support provides something in the future:
it has the possibility to synchronise mail folders, so if it can do that
with user's mailboxes (including flags) there is a good failover
situation.

Another option that might do the trick for small situations is use
something like unison or rsync to synchronise the imap-directories from
the "main-server" to the fallback server. If the first one fails the
second one has a copy of the mail directories, however maybe outdated by
e.g. an hour.

NFS doesn't work well I think since when the fileserver goes down
(hardware failure) the data is unreachable anyway. AFS was commercial I
thought, and what CODA is concerned: I haven't looked at it so close, I
thought it had only an option to cache a part of the data: that wouldn't
be sufficient to let a second server "take over" de data for a while.
Is this is a solution, I'd like to hear more about it.

Paul

-----Oorspronkelijk bericht-----
Van: owner-info-cyrus at lists.andrew.cmu.edu
[mailto:owner-info-cyrus at lists.andrew.cmu.edu] Namens David Chait
Verzonden: zaterdag 19 oktober 2002 8:24
Aan: info-cyrus at lists.andrew.cmu.edu
Onderwerp: Distributed File Systems

Greetings,
    Has anyone here looked into or had experience with Distributed File
Systems (AFS, NFS, CODA, etc) applied to mail partitions to allow for
clusetering or fail over capability of Cyrus IMAP machines? I have seen
docs for splitting the accounts between machines, however this doesn't
seem like the best fault tollerant solution.