mail server replication

[Colin Bruce]

Dear Kevin,

Yes, we ran UW impa for some time with drbd doing replication and it was
very successful. Of course UW imap doesn't have any databases so I don't
know whether that would cause a problem with drbd. I guess the worst case
would be a reconstruct perhaps but even that would be much better than
losing the contents of a server. We has used drbd in various places and it
is very good.

Best wishes...
Colin


On Fri, 21 May 2004, Kevin P. Fleming wrote:

> Colin Bruce wrote:
>
> > I haven't tried it yet but it may be that DRBD  (http://www.drbd.org)
> > might be able to do what you want. We used it with a UW Imap server and I
> > don't see why it shouldn't work with Cyrus. It is probably possible to
> > split the users between two cyrus servers and have each group replicated
> > to the other server so that each server could become a server with all
> > users reasonably quickly. I suspect it would take a few minutes to fail
> > over. As I say I haven't tried this so perhaps it won't work.
>
> drbd in combination with "heartbeat" and a journalling filesystem can do
> exactly this. You can have Cyrus IMAP running on both servers (different
> users), with the Cyrus storage areas mirrored to the other server via
> drbd. When heartbeat notices that one of the servers has died, it can
> mount the other server's storage area (since it has a copy) and start up
> Cyrus (and take over the other server's IP address as well, of course).
>
> Users would notice a service disruption, but it's not likely any mail
> would be lost and they would only have to reconnect. If their mail
> client is set to only connect/check their mailboxes every few minutes,
> they may not notice the switchover at all :-)
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