High availability email server...

[Chris St. Pierre]

Michael--

One of the major problems you'd run into is /var/lib/imap, the config
directory.  It contains, among other things, a Berkeley DB of
information about the mail store.  GFS, Lustre, and other cluster
filesystems do file-level locking; in order to properly read and write
to the BDB backend, you'd need DB-level locking, which is not possible
from a filesystem.  If you tried putting /var/lib/imap on shared
storage, you'd have data corruption and loss in no time.

IMAP is also a stateful connection; depending on how you set up your
cluster, some clients might not handle it gracefully (e.g., Pine).

Chris St. Pierre
Unix Systems Administrator
Nebraska Wesleyan University

On Sat, 29 Jul 2006, Michael Menge wrote:

> Hi,
>
> Quoting Pascal Gienger <Pascal.Gienger at uni-konstanz.de>:
>
>>
>>
>> I would NEVER suggest to mount the cyrus mail spool via NFS, locking is
>> important and for these crucial things I like to have a real block
>> device with a real filesystem, so SANs are ok to me.
>>
>
> does someone use lustre as cyrus mail spoll? Would it be possible to
> run cryus on 2 ore more systems with a shared spool for loadbalancing
> and HA with lustre?
>
> Michael
>
>
>
>