How to build huge services?

[Joe Hamelin]

I've been spending the last two weeks trying to design a mail system
to handle about 10k users.  Just deciding which mix of
MTA/IMAP/database/etc. is requiring much research and testing.  The
thing that keeps me going is the knowledge that the work I put in now
will save my ass later on.

Here's what I'm leaning toward right now:

FreeBSD 4.9 (4.10 by the time it's deployed)
Postfix for the MTA
Cyrus-IMAPd 2.2 and SASL
MySQL 4.0.18
Spamassassin and ClamAV for filtering
Horde/Imp/etc for webmail

Here's ugly ASCII of the hardware design:


         Internet
             |
             |
          (vlan1)
            / \
           /   \
     [LB/vrrp] [LB/vrrp]
         \        /
          \      /
         (--vlan2--)
        /   /    \  \
       /   /      \  \
[mail]  [mail]  [web] [web]
    \     \      /     /
     \     \    /     /
     (-----vlan3------)
      /      |         \
     /       |          \
    /        |           \
[RAID]---[Backup/admin] [SQL]


The LB/vrrp are FreeBSD boxen running as failsafe load balancers.  The
mail and web hosts are as described above.  The RAID is a Procom
NetFORCE 800.  The backup/admin box will take snapshots of the RAID
and act as a backup fileserver and/or SQL host and perform various
admin tasks.  The SQL is a box running mysql that serves all the
database needs for the system.

As I test and research more I'll get some better documents on the web.
If you have any comments or suggestions I'm more than welcome to hear
them.

Regards,

Joe


-- 
  ========================================================
   Joe Hamelin       joe at nethead.com                W7COM
   Nethead, Inc.   Edmonds, Washington       206.898.8086
  ========================================================