load balancing - email server

[Oliver Brandmueller]

Hello.

On Thu, Apr 28, 2005 at 02:31:38PM +1300, Sam Kava wrote:
> I am planning to setup a load balancing server to allow 3 pop servers to
> share access to my mail server. Read the postings but nobody really
> touch this subject. Appreciate any help, hopefully someone has done this
> using freebsd.

The mail storage format should be Maildir - which is NFS safe. Access to 
Maildir mailboxes by pop can be accomplished by courier-imap (it has a 
POP component) or the dovecot imap/pop server. I have both running in a 
single setup (for access to different mailboxes). The dir with the 
mailboxes can then simply be mounted from an NFS server. You should 
think about a shared authentication mechanism; we use LDAP for that.

It's quite simple. We even use more than one SMTP Server to handle 
incoming mails in this setup. Lodabalncing is done by an Alteon 180e in 
front of the machines (currently 3, soon to be 5).

- Oliver

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