designing a backup mail server

[Patrick Radtke]

On Jun 24, 2005, at 2:09 AM, Shaun Feeley wrote:

> Hi Guys,
> I'm not sure if I'm at the right place so sorry if this is annoying
> but...
>
> I run a cyrus mail server here at Cytopia supporting about 35  
> users.  I
> have recently purchased some new boxes to upgrade the servers.  I am
> upgrading the Cyrus server, but I am also keen to run a mirror backup
> cyrus server.  Now my question is, can anyone give me any pointers on
> how to go about designing a backup mail server.

I would suggest using the 2.3 replication mechanism.
I've been using it for 6-7 weeks in production with about 100 users.

The basic idea is that a program(sync_client) runs on your main cyrus  
server and pushes any changes to the backup.


> I have configured one box as I want, then mirrored in onto  
> another.  But
> I am confused about the DNS setup .. should I create an alias ie mail
> that can point to either??


We run our setup in a murder, so we just update the mailbox list on  
the frontends to point to the backup server in case of a failure.

>
> And secondly I am keen to somehow have the mail server polled and  
> if it
> stops responding bring the backup server into play.  To keep them
> syncronised I am planning to use rsync... but then how do I keep the
> sasl backend in sync, with different realms etc?

Our failover step is manual. We think failures will be rare, and  
don't want to be concerned with an automatic mechanism mistakenly  
making the backup server active.


-Patrick

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: https://lists.andrew.cmu.edu/mailman/private/info-cyrus/attachments/20050627/15856c13/attachment.html