Re: Ok, I'm sold!
On Tue, Oct 29, 2002 at 05:07:52PM -0500, Scott St. John wrote:
> Thanks to a friend very familiar with Debian I have my first Debian
> server up and running on a Dual Processor IBM Netfinity Server. One
> word: ROCKS!
>
> Just in playing around I see what I was hoping for with RH, speed,
> stability, performance! NICE :)
>
> Moving user accounts over tonight and will start the tests for it to
> become a replacement email server.
btw, i strongly recommend switching from sendmail to postfix as part of
the upgrade.
postfix is mostly backwards-compatible with sendmail, but a lot faster
and a lot better at resource management...i've seen sendmail boxes crash
under less than 1/10th of the mail load that the exact same machine was
capable of handling after we switched to postfix.
a nice mail setup is:
MTA: postfix-tls (supports RFC2847 TLS encryption and SMTP AUTH)
MDA: courier-maildrop
POP & IMAP: courier-pop, courier-pop-ssl, courier-imap, courier-imap-ssl
WEBMAIL: courier's sqwebmail
ANTI-SPAM: amavis with spamassassin, and lots of entries in your postfix
smtpd_*_restrictions access maps.
ANTI-VIRUS: amavis with clamav
all of these are, of course, packaged for debian.
as always, the most important factor for performance of a busy mail
server is the disks. mail is an I/O-bound application, your CPUs will
be sitting idle most of the time waiting for data to/from the drives.
a large hardware RAID-5 array with non-volatile write caching is ideal
for mail. also, reiserfs or XFS filesystems are a better choice than
ext2 (especially if you use Maildir/ which results in lots of little
files in a directory, which is a real performance killer under
traditional type *nix filesystems like ext2)
this issue is discussed regularly on the postfix-users mailing list.
check the archives for more info if you're interested.
http://www.postfix.org/ and follow the links to the list archives.
craig
--
craig sanders <cas@taz.net.au>
Fabricati Diem, PVNC.
-- motto of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch
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