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
