Best practise?

[Haakon Eriksen]

Peter Russell <pete at ENITECH.COM.AU> writes:

> 2 questions

Which Julian has already answered. I'm pretty much just re-posting the
mail I wrote this morning to see if I've gotten my list subscription
to work correctly :)

> I currently scan mail for a handful of domains and less than 2000
> users. I have primary and secondary MailScanner servers both with own
> MX records of different weights. They are on 2 different physical
> networks/sites, but one of those networks and the site is being
> decommissioned. The second machine will moved to the same rack as the
> primary. We have a another MailScanner machine that handles outbound
> mail only.
>
> Should i just turn the secondary into a backup MX and simplify the
> whole thing by having just one mailscanner and the backup mx machines?
> Or is it better to continue to maintain two mailscanners? My
> preference is for the ms+backupMX option but not sure of there are
> drawbacks with this that i havent considered?

If you have two MS-boxes, you'd have (or could quite easily get) some
sort of redundancy, which gives you more time when the primary box
goes belly up. It would also make it a bit easier to scale to more
boxes if that's needed for some reason.

OTOH, if you have two machines doing the same thing it's nice to have
things like automatic synchronization of config files and stuff like
that, which can really add to the complexity of your setup. Or you
might already have a system for that. 

> My next question is that we provide a service that is an email address
> for ex students for life. Its a subdomain of ours and there is no mail
> storage, it is simply a forwarding/redirecting service. There is a web
> gui that allows users to change their forwarding address. The
> development guys dont like the system that does it now and would
> prefer to output a text file from their app and let me redirect this
> using Postfix on MailScanner. Is Virtual Alias maps the best way?

Sounds OK to me, assuming Postfix is comfortable with it. If you're
having performance issues you could probably speed things up by using
CDB tables or something instead, but that would also add complexity.
Especially if you'd have to convert from the text files you get from
the web app.

-- 
 Haakon Eriksen      [ h.g.eriksen at usit.uio.no ]
 Central Computing Services,  University of Oslo

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