choosing a file system

[Bron Gondwana]

On Sat, Jan 10, 2009 at 02:35:53PM -0500, Jorey Bump wrote:
> 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.

Yeah, except Postfix encodes the inode of the queue files in its queue
IDs, so it gets very confused if you do this.  Same with restoring
queues from backups.

My searches on the postfix mailing list archives have shown similar
questions being asked a couple of times, but nobody has come up with
a really good solution so far.

We do keep inhouse patches against postfix - I think we apply 6 at the
moment.  So I'm happy to make small changes to support this :)
 
> Jorey ( big fan of Bron's occasional parenthetical sig comments! )

Bron ( I try ;) )