Multiple servers and NFS

Nick Edwards nick.z.edwards at gmail.com
Mon Jul 28 11:09:01 UTC 2014


On 7/26/14, Robert Schetterer <rs at sys4.de> wrote:
> Am 25.07.2014 um 16:12 schrieb Eduardo Ramos:
>> I did not understand what the advantage of use dovecot LMTP with
>> director too.
>
> in "very short" words...
> with nfs ,the director should avoid concurrent events
> which may happen with lmtp too, depending to multiple server setup
>

A few of us run large NFS based systems without director, however
mostly 99% pop3, not using director on imap has little impact either
from our tests, remember, director is only a couple years at most old,
people have been doing NFS mailstorage for decades, and with relation
to dovecot, ten years or so, the sky never collapsed back then, it
hasnt now either thus far :->
using director was considered in risk assessment as its another point
of failure, and weighed against its claimed benefit, the decision was
made its not justified.

note: we dont use lmtp, each mx mounts/stores directly to EMC storgage
with dovecot-lda, 14 front ends = 14 direct storages, sure, means
dovecot needs to be installed on each mx (but not listening), but it
eliminates the need for dedicated back ends to send to, each mx is
that backend.

12 pop3 servers, of note however, we use index:memory on pop3 and smtp's

mail_location = maildir:/mail/%1n/%1.1n/%2.1n/%n/Maildir:INDEX=MEMORY

only 3 imaps one of which is webmail, and of course we do not use
index:memory on them, these are behind real (serveriron's) load
balancers, so if using pretend load balancers :-> YMMV


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