High availability email server...

[Chris St. Pierre]

Chad--

We've put /var/lib/imap and /var/spool/imap on a SAN and have two
machines -- one active, and one hot backup.  If the active server
fails, the other mounts the storage and takes over.  This is not yet
in production, but it's a pretty simple setup and can be done without
running any bleeding edge software, and it appears that it will work
fine.  There's no need to use a SAN, either -- you could share your
mail storage out via NFS with the same effect.

We're going production with this in mid-August; if you'd like to know
how everything goes, drop me a note in a month or so.

Chris St. Pierre
Unix Systems Administrator
Nebraska Wesleyan University

On Thu, 27 Jul 2006, Chad A. Prey wrote:

>OK...I'm searching for strategies to have a "realtime" email backup in
>the event of backend failure. We've been running cyrus-imap for about a
>year and a half with incredible success. Our failures have all been due
>to using junky storage.
>
>One idea is to have a continuous rsync of the cyrus /var/spool/imap
>and /var/lib/imap to another server
>
>I've also considered delivering email to two discreet email backends and
>keeping the /var/lib/imap file sync'd . I don't think I can use murder
>to do this.
>
>Is anyone out there using RHEL in a cluster that would like to share
>their architecture? Any contractors out there that want to get paid to
>help us implement?
>
>Chad P.
>cprey at salk.edu
>Salk Institute for Biological Studies
>
>
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>
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