On Thu, 2002-01-10 at 14:06, Thomas J. Hudak wrote: > Outside of the linux world, go with any of the BSD's and use VINUM to > create raid volumes, using soft-updates to increase data-reliability, > the BSD's have wonderful load-balancing capabilites as well, and you > can't beat BSD's rock solid stability.. Hell, if it's good enough for > M$ and hotmail, I'd say it's hold it's own for your situation. Softupdates are not good on rapidly changing data (they recommend not using it on /var cause it's very likely you'll not get log information in the event of a crash. In the case of mail you'd definitely LOOSE ALOT OF SHIT on a busy mail spool in the event of a failure. Softupdates is for performance increase but does NOT guarantee data integrity. Vinum doesn't support multi-node / multi-initiator. But pool may one day work on BSD if it doesn't already. GFS is not exactly fast btw, but it is safe. And it's highly available. There is alot of other stuff to consider when planning a cluster mailserver there's a LUGger who gave sistina a talk on this very thing while he worked for Sendmail Inc (I'll let him say who he is) and he brought up alot of points (most of which escape me at the moment) that make this an extremely non-trivial task to do correctly. Mostly these concerns refered to shared-storage and not neccesarily the process of keeping the servers working together. Things like directory contention, lockspace, points of failure etc. -- Ben Lutgens http://people.sistina.com/~blutgens/ System Administrator Sistina Software Inc. "If you love someone, set them free. If they come home, set them on fire." - George Carlin orge Carlin -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 232 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://shadowknight.real-time.com/pipermail/tclug-list/attachments/20020110/2cad4e71/attachment.pgp