MailScanner on a cluster

[Dave Strydom]

Julian,

I'm already using the DNS round-robin system of both solution 1 and
solution 2, there is just one problem...

These mailscanners are part of a webhosting setup and handle mail for
about 2500+ different domains, I don't want to have to go update all
MX records everytime i want to add an additional server. Also some
people handle their own DNS records, so then it's a mission to send
out notifications and asking people to sort out their MX records.

What I am looking at doing is keeping my current "external ip's" and
then having them nat into a cluster, but i want to know if I can run
mailscanner on something like an openmosix cluster, this way I can
just add servers to the cluster and not have to worry about additional
 ip's and the updates that go with it.

Dave
On 5/22/06, Julian Field <MailScanner at ecs.soton.ac.uk> wrote:
> Dave Strydom wrote:
> > Please excuse my ignorance, but can anyone point me in the right
> > direction of:
> >
> > a) is it possible to run MailScanner on a cluster
> Yes.
> > b) If so, can you please point me to some documentation so i can read
> > up on it please.
> It's very easy.
> At the simplest level, which actually works remarkably well considering
> how cheap the solution is, is this:
>
> Solution 1
> ===========
> Create a new DNS record called mx.yourdomain.com and assign multiple
> 'A'records to it, one for each of the IP addresses used by your cluster
> of servers.
> Put a single 'MX' record in your domain's DNS records, pointing to
> "mx.yourdomain.com." (Don't forget the "." on the end).
>
> @        10 IN MX        mx.mydomain.com.
> mx       IN A          192.168.99.101
>             IN A          192.168.99.102
>             IN A          192.168.99.103
>             IN A          192.168.99.104
>             IN A          192.168.99.105
>
> It's as simple as that. The DNS lookups will rotate through the members
> of your cluster, spreading the messages (by quantity, not by size)
> across your cluster.
>
> Solution 2
> ===========
> You can also do this by having multiple MX records all with the same
> priority number, each pointing to mx1, mx2, mx3, mx4 etc.
>
> @        10 IN MX        mx1.mydomain.com.
>            10 IN MX        mx2.mydomain.com.
>            10 IN MX        mx3.mydomain.com.
>            10 IN MX        mx4.mydomain.com.
>            10 IN MX        mx5.mydomain.com.
> mx1       IN A          192.168.99.101
> mx2       IN A          192.168.99.102
> mx3       IN A          192.168.99.103
> mx4       IN A          192.168.99.104
> mx5       IN A          192.168.99.105
>
> Some people argue that this is better as it is more likely to deliver
> mail quicker when you take some of your servers out of action. They are
> possibly right.
>
> Solution 3
> ===========
> You can also do this by spending a fortune on Cisco load balancers and
> have heartbeat monitoring systems, etc. But it won't make any big
> difference, but you will have a very expensive Cisco box to look after
> and a big hole in your bank balance.
>
> Again, can someone please put this in the Wiki for me?
>
> --
> Julian Field
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