very interesing your comments.....I am installing a box with postfix+courier-pop3+courier-imap. When woody gets stable state, I will upgrade my mailserver, anf of course, I will post you the results and problems ......
Thanks to all.
Un saludo.
-----Mensaje original-----
De: Russell Coker [mailto:russell@coker.com.au]
Enviado el: martes, 19 de febrero de 2002 7:51
Para: Craig Sanders
CC: Javier Castillo Alcibar; debian-isp@lists.debian.org
Asunto: Re: Upgrade a mail server
On Tue, 19 Feb 2002 10:38, Craig Sanders wrote:
> > > I have a debian 2.1 email server, with sendmail as smtp server, and
> > > qpopper as POP3 server. This box hosts several domains (about 100
> > > different domains, using virtual hosting), with a total of 1300
> > > users. Because the auth method is based on /etc/passwd, I have 1300
> > > unix user accounts, one per mailbox, of course.
> > >
> > > This is becomming not scalable, and I want to start to use a mail
> > > server with auth based on sql, using MySQL for example. I am
> > > thinking in use a debian woody( I'll wait till woody becomes
> > > stable), with sendmail as smtp server, but I am not sure about the
> > > pop3 daemon I have to use.
> >
> > /etc/passwd should scale to 1300 users, using nscd should solve any
> > problems there. But chances are that changing how you look up user
> > names won't make any noticable difference in performance.
>
> yes, /etc/passwd scales up to several thousand accounts - at least 5000
> or 10000 depending on how good your hardware is.
I expect that /etc/passwd would cause performance problems before 10K users.
I used to run a machine with 27K users, it ran like a dog (load average was
always >30, the system was not responsive, commands like "ls -l /tmp" would
take noticable amounts of time to complete). When I configured it to use
hashed indexes to /etc/passwd (this was on AIX which does it much better than
Linux) the load average dropped to between 0.5 and 4 (depending on the time
of day), CPU usage was often less than 100%, and everything was responsive!
> you don't need nscd,
> just hashed map files for /etc/{passwd,group,shadow). there's a
> Makefile in /var/lib/misc which handles that.
The problem is that the utility programs like passwd(1) aren't smart enough
to update the hash, and the libraries that read from the hashes aren't smart
enough to check the time stamps and use /etc/passwd if it's more recent. AIX
does this much better.
> i'd love to convert it over to Maildir/ but haven't yet found any way
> that doesn't involve many hours of downtime while converting the
> mailboxes from mbox format to Maildir.
>
> one of these days i'll have the time to sit down and work out a good
> solution to the problem. i've got some ideas but no time to work them
> out.
Conversion doesn't require system down-time. Firstly you create Maildir
directories. Then you can convert the mail server to Maildir delivery in a
matter of minutes, then you run a conversion script to convert mbox files to
Maildir (may take hours or even a day depending on system speed and size of
the spool). When you think it's about half done you change the POP and IMAP
servers to read from Maildir instead of mbox. The end result is that there
is a matter of minutes of actual down time, and for some users it will appear
that their mail has been delayed (there are no guarantees about delivery time
anyway).
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