G'dayYou can run a fairly nice setup with a low-end machine. The biggest cpu hogs on a mailserver of what I have seen have been the pop server.. make sure you go with a mailserver that uses maildir. We use postfix here, but qmail should be nice and even good old sendmail works fine with the right delivery agent. But both qmail and postfix are easy to setup.. as for pop/imap we use courier here, it works well and isnt that slow either.. as for storage, 3GB on 400 users should be sufficient, it depends on how much mail you allow your users to store.. if they store too much mails your filesystem choice begins to matter as well, as for example current ext2 totally bogs down with over 3000 files in a directory.. and yes, we have seen email users leaving that amount in their boxes.. it's amazing how much you can cram in on 5MB :-)
Anyway, what matters mostly is your user patterns.. If they are modem users that box will probably do with a little more ram and HDD.. if they are broadband/fiber users
you will need to upgrade... Regards Roger Abrahamsson Michael Kean wrote:
G'day all! For the last 5 years I've been running a 33.6K ISP. It's now time to upgrade. In the process I intend to change my isp name, and <i>hopefully</i> either build my own mail server or use someone else's. My Happy but tiny Debian box on a 686-PR200 running 150MHz with 64M RAM has been running a breed of radius, apache and squid. With roughly 400 users on the books I am quite sure my 3 Gig HDD is not going to be big enough. (perhaps it would be close if I kill squid and enable limits??) However, is the CPU and RAM sufficient to run a mail server, or is it really upgrade time. I have never set up an email server either - so am open to suggestions as to what's best to use. I have heard good reports of SpamAssassin as well, and wouldn't mind integrating that; perhaps as a later date. I may even need support from someone - so am potentially open to offers. Thanks for your time :) Debian is certainly a hell of a lot more hackerproof than RedHat was :) Cheers, Michael Kean.
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