Johan Hendriks put forth on 11/3/2010 3:32 AM:
Hello, i am working primarly with FreeBSD, and the latest release has a service called HAST. See it as a mirrored disk over the network. You can install both machines with dovecot, and use the hast disk as the data storage. With CARP in the mix, when the master machine fails, it starts dovecot on the slave. This way you have a failover without user interference.
How do you automatically redirect clients to the IP address of the slave when the master goes down? Is this seamless? What is the duration of "server down" seen by clients? Seconds, minutes?
When you bring the master back up after repairing the cause of the failure, does it automatically and correctly resume mirroring of the HAST device so it obtains the new emails that were saved to the slave while it was offline? How do you then put the master back into service and make the slave offline again?
-- Stan