Small Redundant web/mail setup

[Ted Mittelstaedt]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Ian Lord" <mailing-lists at msdi.ca>
To: <freebsd-questions at freebsd.org>
Sent: Wednesday, October 18, 2006 5:34 AM
Subject: Small Redundant web/mail setup


> Hi,
> 
> I need to setup a high-availability setup for mail/web setup
> 
> I was thinking about the following setup:
> 
> 4 servers total:
> 

overkill, just asking for trouble.

> Data Servers:
>          1 Server holding all the websites data and mail messages. It 
> would serve these files via nfs to the application servers.
>          It would also run mysql
> 
>          A second server Also sharing it's content via nfs, 
> replicating it's data though rsync each ?? minutes. The mysql would 
> run as a slave of the    primary
> 
> Application Servers:
>          Both servers would be running apache, php, sendmail and 
> posfix and would serve content from the share nfs drive.
> 
> 1- Is this a viable solution, I mean by that, Is it Like this big ISP 
> are set up ?
> 

no

The really big ISP's use proprietary commercial clustering solutions
that make multiple systems appear as one single system.  We are talking
hundreds of thousands to millions of users.  We are not talking 5000
users or fewer.

You can easily serve 5K users on a single server.  You just need to
get good hardware.  In other words, costs start at $5000 and go up.

A lot of people are under the misconception that they can get several
cheap $900 servers and assemble them into a redundant setup that is
highly reliable.

The real secret is in getting expensive name-brand hardware that
doesen't go down.  If you can afford that, your fine.  If you can't,
then you need to find a different table to play at.

Ted