[Dovecot] Recommended method?

[Timo Sirainen]

On 28.1.2010, at 2.37, Brandon Lamb wrote:

> Hopefully this isnt TOO general of a question.
> 
> I have a raid server that runs dovecot and exports via nfs the maildir
> format store.
> I have 4 mail servers running exim that use dovecot to deliver over nfs

What about your Dovecot servers, how many of them do you have?

> I have been examing our entire setup and had the thought, would it be
> recommended to instead have another exim process running directly on
> the raid server and have my mail servers deliver mail to that rather
> than over nfs, if that makes sense?
> 
> So mail would go from our postini frontend => mail cluster => final
> delivery via exim on raid server.
> 
> Seems like this way I could make all the nfs config options go away and such.

The problems with NFS go away if user's mails are never concurrently accessed by more than one server. It doesn't matter if the other server is another NFS client or the NFS server itself.

So if you have a single Dovecot IMAP/POP server, the only way to avoid NFS issues is by having that same server also deliver the mails.