Some questions while I plan my redeployment/reinstall

[Scott Silva]

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Some inline answers

> Hello all!
> 
> It's been a long time since I've posted to the list. I hope everyone is
> well.

The same to you
> 
> I'm planning to do a complete reinstall using the latest software that
> make up a good MailScanner box. My Linux distro will be FC4 and my MTA
> will be sendmail.

Maybe a RHEL clone like Whitebox or CentOS would be more appropriate
> 
> I'll still be using the same hardware as I am currently, but that's
> probably not so bad as the server load seems to be quite low in it's
> current form. I just hope that all the new software doesn't become too
> much for the machine.
> 
> I'm making my own document right now (which may or may not be worth
> distributing once I'm finished with it) and I've got a few questions for
> the list.
> 
> I understand that some of the following questions can only really be
> answered by knowing what kind of traffic I get. According to
> MailScanner-MRTG the Average (Count of Recipients) for Number of
> Messages Processed in the past year is 598 and in the past year the
> average number of Bytes of Mail Transferred is 8MB. Traffic has been
> consistantly going down over the past year. But that's not to say that
> the traffic 1 year ago was much higher than it is now.
> 
> I don't know the specs on this computer(!) but top says I have about
> 255MB of RAM.

Might be tight on ram if you want to do spam scanning, virus scanning,
etc... but it might do with a minimum of children in MailScanner.
It would depend on the processor and i/o speeds.
> 
> So... on with the questions.
> 
> 1. Is MCP worth the trouble of patching SpamAssassin (I've only briefly
> read over the steps that are listed in the Wiki but it seemed rather
> involved)?

You can simulate MCP with spamassassin rules.
> 
> 2. Currently I use MailScanner-MRTG to get an idea of what's happening
> with my box. Is MailWatch a complete replacement for MSMRTG or should I
> install both? And what about Vispan, how does that compare?

I run all of them. They have different uses and give different info.
> 
> 3. With regards to performance, right now I'm not doing any AV scanning
> so I don't know what kind of load it will put on my box. I plan to use
> only ClamAV and BitDefender and MAYBE one from Symantec if they have a
> command line option available for Linux in their Enterprise Suite). What
> kind of load should I expect from these with the amount of traffic I
> have?

If you could find some memory in a donor machine or something, it might
make things better.
> 
> 4. How about Pyzor/Razor/DCC? (I don't really know what they do yet as
> I've still got a lot of reading to do. :) ) Will these greatly increase
> the load?

They increase the load, but are worth it for the increased reliability
of spam detection. On my current system, log rotation gives the biggest
spike in activity. It is a dual 1Ghz pIII with 2 Gb ram. Overkill, but
it serves many other purposes as well as mail.

> 
> 
> I think that's it for now!
> 
> 
> Thanks everyone!
> Chris.
> 


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