[TriLUG] seeking advice for a bullet-proof mail server

[Brandon L. Newport]

I would suggset what you have listed qmail which the combo you have is
often called a qmail toaster...you can find more about how to do it on
qmailrocks.org, in addition I would suggest utilizing
www.opengroupware.org for the rest of you companies needs.  I have
started using this for my clients and everyone loves it!  I am currently
working on this scenerio in a failover capacity...once the clients
primary server comes in :)

-brandon



On Fri, 2004-11-05 at 09:38 -0500, Ryan Leathers wrote:
> My company needs a new mail server.  This server will support various
> automation and workflow concerns as well as a light volume of customer mail.
> It will be supported by my customer facing organization rather than the
> Enterprise IT organization, so I have convinced the decision makers to let
> me stray from the IT standard of Microsoft Exchange.  Though I suspect the
> volume of mail to be light, it must still be a highly reliable system.  I
> would love to be able to make the case for migrating the entire company away
> from Exchange someday.
> 
> My thought is to use qmail along with qtrap, clam av, and spam assassin.
> I'm leaning toward qmail since I know it to be simple to set up and
> administer.  That's important since there will be no dedicated mail jockey.
> I am also interested in running a second mail server, not for load
> distribution, simply for redundancy against failure.  This is where I have
> the most questions.  It seems clear to me that setting up two hosts as mail
> exchangers and sharing between them via NFS is absolutely not what I need,
> yet this is the solution I'm turning up when googling for redundant qmail.
> The only way I can imagine this working is if NFS were offering a file
> system from a 3rd reliable location to each of the two hosts.  
> 
> Does anyone have a good suggestion for me to create some redundancy using
> only two hosts?  FYI the hosts themselves are solid hardware with mirrored
> disks.  I also have LVS directors in place so that option is definitely on
> the table in addition to MX record tricks if I can just determine how to get
> the same data on both hosts.  I'm also open to suggestions other than qmail
> if there is a good redundancy story specific to some other solution.    
> 
>