High availability email server...

[Matthew Schumacher]

Andrew Morgan wrote:
> On Fri, 28 Jul 2006, Rich Graves wrote:
> 
>> My question: So is *anyone* here happy with Cyrus on ext3? We're a
>> small site, only 3200 users, 246GB mail. I'd really rather not try
>> anything more exotic for supportability reasons, but I'm getting
>> worried that our planned move from Solaris 9/VxFS to RHEL4/ext3 on
>> significantly newer and faster hardware is going to be a downgrade.
> 
> We run Cyrus on ext3 under Debian Linux without complaints here.  We
> have approximately 35000 mailboxes/users split between 2 backend
> servers. Each backend server is connected to an EMC Cx500 SAN (no shared
> access or anything fancy) with 800GB of mail spool each.  The commands
> used to build the filesystems were:
> 
>   mkfs -t ext3 -j -m 1 -O dir_index /dev/sdb1
>   tune2fs -c 0 -i 0 /dev/sdb1
> 
> The filesystem is mounted like so:
> 
>   /dev/sdb1    /private     ext3    defaults,data=ordered,noatime   0   2
> 
> If you want more information, just ask.  :)
> 
>     Andy

We also use ext3 not because I think it's the fastest or has the most
features but because it just works.  We do volume management with EVMS
and I had a lot of trouble getting XFS and other file systems to
snapshot correctly under heavy load without the box eventually running
into a situation where all processes started to hang waiting for IO
eventually causing a system crash.  Ext3 worked every time so the choice
was obvious.  I figured if it would survive a snapshot while I'm hitting
it very hard with postal then odds of having problems in prod are going
to be pretty slim.

One thing that ext3 does have going for it is the fact that it is the
most tested and most common file system on linux.

schu