Mailscanner filter server to my Mail store " I just canna do it c aptain! "

[Sailer, Timothy]

Here at BNL, we have 3 'smtp gateway' machines, where all e-mail gets passed
through, if it enters or leaves our network. We have the machines all with
the same MX for bnl.gov, they do LDAP lookups for final delivery,
anti-spam/virus with MailScanner, and handle about 9-11G of maial volume
each day, and mostly sit idle.
These are 2.2Ghz P4 with 1G RAM and a scsi3 disk subsystem

Tim

-----Original Message-----
From: Antony Stone [mailto:Antony at SOFT-SOLUTIONS.CO.UK]
Sent: Tuesday, August 26, 2003 9:00 PM
To: MAILSCANNER at JISCMAIL.AC.UK
Subject: Re: Mailscanner filter server to my Mail store " I just canna
do it c aptain! "


On Wednesday 27 August 2003 2:02 am, Damien McKenna wrote:

> On Friday 22 August 2003 03:17 pm, Julian Field wrote:
> > Switch off all spam checks
>
> One idea - set up two machines, both well endowed.  Set the first one to
> only do the virus checks, and then have the second one only do spam
checks.
>  I'm not sure how the server configuration would work to pass the data
from
> one to the other, and I'm sure it could be argued that it would work
better
> as one system, but its just an idea.

I agree with the last point - this would work better as a single system,
therefore if you *can* set up two well endowed machines, better to configure
them both for anti-virus and anti-spam checking, and have equal priority MX
records pointing to them for load balancing.   That way half your mails get
completely processed by each machine, instead of all your mails getting
partly processed by going through both machines.

This solution is much more scalable as well - set up one server doing the
whole job, find out what load it can cope with, then simply replicate that
system N times, where N = (desired load handlling) / (single system load
capacity).   Add more machines for redundancy so you can take one or more
offline for updates etc.

Regards,

Antony.

--

It is also possible that putting the birds in a laboratory setting
inadvertently renders them relatively incompetent.

 - Daniel C Dennett