Cyrus and Samba

[Drew Morris]

It is my understanding that Samba handles the conversion between unix
semantics and windows. NFS has been reportedly unreliable with Cyrus
but I would think that Samba should work fine since it has a sort of
local cache mechanism built into it.

I am not 100% sure of how Samba works or if the semantics would be
handled... anybody know for sure?

- Drew


On Wed, 22 Sep 2004 07:51:57 -0400, David Base <base_david at bah.com> wrote:
> 
> I tried doing something similar to this using Sharity instead of Samba (SMBclient
> is not available in Solaris), i.e., mounting a shared Windows 2000 folder via NFS
> on a Solaris box.  The mount part worked fine, but Cyrus wouldn't write to the
> Windows NTFS file system.  Logged messages like "Invalid mailbox type".
> Apparently Cyrus need unix semantics, mmap, etc.
> 
> I do have two sendmail/cyrus boxes delivering mail to one Solaris mail store shared
> via NFS to the two sendmail/cyrus boxes.  I have read that Cyrus over NFS can be
> unreliable, but it's working on a small scale in the lab.  The db stuff has to
> remain local to each sendmail/cyrus box, and you are right, they do get out of sync
> with each other, specifically the *.seen and *.sub files.  If anyone has ideas for
> mirroring the two please share.
> 
> Our next step is to try putting a SAN behind the Solaris mail store via iSCSI and
> serve a SAN file system via NFS to the two sendmail/cyrus boxes.  I fear we'll have
> file system type issues again with this, but I'll let you know.
> 
> Dave Base
> 
> 
> 
> Drew Morris wrote:
> 
> > All,
> >
> > Pardon me if this question has already been answered (I couldn't find
> > anything) but does Cyrus work over a Samba mount? I was assuming that
> > it did and, if so, this redundancy question seems like it could be
> > solved without much problem.
> >
> > My solution would be:
> >
> > Take multiple boxes running Cyrus and put the mail store on a samba
> > mounted drive that is connected to a NAS, SAN, or other redundant
> > storage array.
> >
> > I assumed that one problem might be the routines that run to keep the
> > db in sync or other administrative routines but those could be handled
> > with scripting.
> >
> > In this type of setup, the redundancy/failover could be handled by a
> > standard load balancer.
> >
> > Am I missing something or is there a problem with Samba for this kind of thing?
> >
> > Thanks for the answer.
> >
> > - Drew
> > ---
> > Cyrus Home Page: http://asg.web.cmu.edu/cyrus
> > Cyrus Wiki/FAQ: http://cyruswiki.andrew.cmu.edu
> > List Archives/Info: http://asg.web.cmu.edu/cyrus/mailing-list.html
> 
>
---
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