On 6/20/06, Axel Thimm Axel.Thimm@atrpms.net wrote:
Axel: why did you move away from GFS? Any particular reason?
The customer I was working for was an early adopter of GFS 6.1 (aka GFS on 2.6) in the hopes that Debian would pick it up, since Debian is the Linux distribution he is running.
When it became apparent that this would not happen within the project's time constraints he had to choose between a cluttered server os landscape vs non having active-active cluster filesystem setups and due to staff constraints chose to freeze the GFS project altogether. That wasn't dovecot or in general mail related.
So unless you face the same constraints, e.g. run a distribution w/o a cluster file system and would have to do it yourself from scratch, going GFS (or OCFS2) is a good idea for dovecot (and exim which was the MTA choice).
I would recommend RHEL4/GFS/dovecot/exim (+ spamassassin/clamav and friends) for a nice scalable cluster solution. In fact the customer's and ATrpms' mail setup is the one I created for the GFS cluster, it now just has one active node (the customer for the reasons above and ATrpms due to not having a SAN :).
Thanks for the detailed reply. I am looking at NFS given Lustre's design and the fact that we have to run with Debian as well. I still don't see GFS in debian stable -- may try a source build (having taken a similar route with Lustre).
Regards,
Mustafa A. Hashmi mahashmi@gmail.com mh@stderr.net