Email delivery (sendmail->procmail->$HOME/mbox) with fallback

John Summerfield debian at herakles.homelinux.org
Mon Jan 7 23:45:13 UTC 2008


Tim Alberts wrote:
> John Summerfield wrote:
>>
>> Are you serious? You are running mission-critical applications on the 
>> second least reliable software offering from the RHL family?
> I'm guessing you don't work in advertising for Red Hat, Fedora, or Linux 
> in general?

I don't.
> 
> 
>>
>> Use good hardware, good software (RHEL or a clone), IMAP and not POP3, 
>> and use one of the reliable RAID (1, 4 or 5) choices for your mail 
>> (and other critical data) storage.
> Been using POP3 forever with no problems (except some Mac problems with 

You do have a problem, your mail is scattered all over the place. imap 
keeps it on the server.


> Dovecot).  Have RAID1 software setup for years as well.  Keep getting 
> drive failures and looking back into hardware RAID with high quality 
> equipment (as mentioned before).
> 
>>
>> Even if a dodgy Fedora software update doesn't get you, you still have 
>> to contend with frequent upgrades of the software.
> Yes, I've dealt with 'dodgy' updates and config files being lost by auto 
> updates, and bug fixes that mess things up that worked fine.  For the 
> price, it has been acceptable (at least to the people in charge of the 
> purse strings).

Price a problem? CentOS is free of charge. It also costs less.

> 
>>
>> Note that RAID _can_ include a network block device (nbd or enhanced 
>> nbd drivers), and drbd also provided RAID1 over a network, and is 
>> tolerant of breaks in connectivity.
>>
>> note that LVM can provide hot backups.
> 
> 
>>
>> One trick I've hard of is to define a firewire drive (presumably USB 
>> or other hotplug drive) would do as part of a mirror pair. Backup goes 
>> something like this:
>> Plug it in
>> Resync.
>> Detach (I don't recall the fine details here)
>> Unplug.
> Used removable drive trays for rsync backups without the RAID. Now we 
> got backup systems that are rsync backed up and ready to run in 
> failures.  However, any email that was delivered between the last rsync 
> and the failure gets lost temporarily or permanently.  Hence my idea for 
> NFS mount to quality RAID1

NFS has its own problems. enbd and drdb are better than rsync.
> 
>>
>> Google for terms such as "reliable linux" "high availability linux" 
>> "linux cluster" etc for more details.
> Google'd and Yahoo'd...seen hundreds of ideas mostly based on 
> heartbeat.  In fact I most recently was looking into Red Hat's Global 
> File System and clustering:
> 
> http://www.redhat.com/gfs/
> http://www.redhat.com/cluster_suite/
> 
> Trying to figure out how Red Hat is accomplishing these things with open 
> source, or if they are adding their own proprietary background stuff.

Look at CentOS. If it's in that (I believe it is) then it's OSS.
> 
> 
> 
> All-in-all, fun discussion, but completely off topic from my original 
> post and still doesn't answer my question.

I'm more concerned with the underlying problem than with your proposed 
solution.

Do you want the best solution?

-- 

Cheers
John

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