On Wed, Jun 02, 2004 at 08:06:14PM +0200, Vegard Svanberg wrote:
A usual hosting provider setup depends on having one IP ("virtual mailserver") per domain. Using dovecot on servers handling hundreds or thousands of domains today equals to having multiple instances of dovecot running.
This problem could be solved by making dovecot take into account the IP address the user connects to and authenticate against the proper {database, table, pw-file, [...]} based on that.
Comments?
I've worked at very large ISPs, and we never did virtual hosting based on IP address; we simply made the logins unique.
some systems used logins like abc123456, where 'abc' is a prefix specific to that ISP, and '123456' is a sequence number
other systems used username@domain as the login (i.e. the primary E-mail address of the mailbox)
You would be very hard pressed these days to justify to RIPE/ARIN/APNIC that you want hundreds of IP addresses just for virtualising POP3 mailboxes (similarly FTP servers for uploading website contents).
Even migrating existing ISPs was not a problem; the logins never clashed. Perhaps we we fortunate that in the odd occasion where two different systems had been using the same prefix 'abc' for logins, that they used different ranges of sequence numbers.
Regards,
Brian.