[Dovecot] Maildir over NFS

[Noel Butler]

On Fri, 2010-08-06 at 13:31 -0600, CJ Keist wrote:


> 
> For our new mail server I'm looking to switch to the Maildir format.  
> Some years ago I remember reading that it was not recommended to run 
> Maildir format over NFS.  Now I'm looking at several posts that seem to 
> indicate that Maildir should run fine over NFS.  I'm a little concerned 


Maildir was designed with NFS in mind, it is, always has been, and
always will be, perfectly suited to any mail based system.
It was,  is, and likely always will be,  mbox  that is dangerous to use
over NFS.


> about running Maildir over NFS, especially from the howto conversion 
> pages I read would move all messages over to the User ~/Maildir folder 
> including the inbox.  So having every single mail transaction going over 
> NFS doesn't seem the smart thing to do.
> 


Actually you will not notice any difference. How do you think all the
big boys do it now :)  Granted some opted for the SAN approach over NAS,
but for mail, NAS is better way to go IMHO and plenty of large services,
ISP, corporations, and universities etc, all use NAS.

One thing I strongly suggest however, for added security, is to use an
internal private RFC1918 based LAN for NFS using your second ethernet
port.


> So question I have for the dovecot team, does running Maildir over NFS 



For years, safely and happily.


> We have about 3400 users, doing about 30k mail deliveries daily.  Some 
> users have 10's of thousands of mail messages in hundreds of mail folders.
> 


Run systems where multiple front end MTA's each processing 1.1million
messages a day, and that's accepted messages each, not counting rejected
connections, along with the several pop3 and webmail servers, all
talking to this same mail system, best to use a dedicated device like a
NetApp filer as the NAS though, not a garden variety server, but, even
so, so long as the hardware is good, I can't see how you could go wrong
with even that.

Oh, and I trust you are using a virtual users and not system users,
might be a good time to at least "think" about that if your still using
system users, since you can expand to multiple servers easily, in fact,
with only 2 minutes effort.

Cheers

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