choosing a file system

[Jorey Bump]

Bron Gondwana wrote, at 01/10/2009 04:56 AM:

> So - no filesystem is sacred.  Except for bloody out1 with its 1000+
> queued postfix emails and no replication.  It's been annoying me for
> over a year now, because EVERYTHING ELSE is replicated.  We've got
> some new hardware in place, so I'm investigating drbd as an option
> here.  Not convined.  It still puts us at the mercy of a filesystem
> crash.  
> 
> I'd prefer a higher level replication solution, but I don't know 
> any product that replicates outbound mail queues nicely between
> multiple machines in a way that guarantees that every mail will be
> delivered at least once, and if there's a machine failure the only
> possible failure mode is that the second machine isn't aware that
> the message hasn't been delivered yet, so delivers it again.  That's
> what I want.

You could regularly rsync or rdiff-backup your Postfix queue directory
to another machine where Postfix lies dormant, but with a similar
configuration. In the event of a machine failure, you can start up
Postfix on the backup, which may even be able to function as a complete
replacement (submission, MX, delivery over LMTP). There is still
opportunity for minor race conditions and automating failover needs to
be worked out, but it's better than nothing.

Jorey ( big fan of Bron's occasional parenthetical sig comments! )