Email server Clustering/Redundancy

Hi Everyone,

Our mail server died for several hours due to a hardware failure, we dont have any extra parts laying around so we have to order it sameday.

We did not loose any emails because we have a MX backup collecting incoming email. The problem is: user can't send and receive emails until we resolve the issue.

I would say it would be one of the Best Howto to include in Howtoforge.
MX backup is good for short term downtime but not for long term ones.

A howto on linux HA (heartbeat), FreeBSD (VRRP), OpenBSD (CARP) would be
greatly appreciated.

Thanks

 

I second this motion, I've got two computers and luckaly two houses in vastly diffrent area's, a guide on how to use them both as mail servers efectively would be briliant!

 

just an idea, i didnt try it before.

maybe Heartbeat for failover, DRBD for mirror user mailbox and user account between 2 server.

actually, Falko wrote a great guide, u may want to have a look:
http://www.howtoforge.com/high_availability_nfs_drbd_heartbeat

 

I'll have to look up NFS server, the idea of putting all the E-mail data and profiles on one and getting them to mirror eachother sounds delightfull!

 

come on everyone, start working on it.

 

What about noahlau's proposal?

 

gonna try it in weekend.

 

Should i mirror the mail queue directory ?

any advices ?

 

What exactly are you trying to do?

 

i mean when the server1 go down, the emails contained in server1 's mail queue will be lost if we only mirror the user mail box.

 

But the mails will be delivered when server1 comes up again...
And you shouldn't have many mails in the queue on a properly configured server...

 

i see, many thanks !

 

I think I'm almost done, I did this with QMAIL.
I just need to unmirror the queue directory.

 

Cyrus Murder ?
http://cyrusimap.web.cmu.edu/imapd/install-murder.html

 

Hello,

Im about to try this out, but i have a question regarding email clustering.

How do i handle the disk space thing? Im probably need to buy 3 1TB disks so i need one more server to do this.
Do i create two NFS servers with 3TB each and share the space betweem them?

I cannot understand how to cluster the disk space being used by the email data.

Thank you in advance.

 

For storage, you can use NFS, but the best way you can get what you want is using GFS or even NBD (Network Block Device).