File system mirroring for SMTP/POP Servers

[Chuck Swiger]

Mario Lopez wrote:
[ ...failover for POP... ]
> I have read about file system mirroring over NFS but it looks like 
> something in development than a mature solution.

This is a really hard problem domain to deal with.  The reason why you see 
references to NFS is that people used to provide redundant mail spool access 
via NFS or one of the more complex network filesystems like AFS (which would 
provide read-write access, rather than read-only access in the case of the 
main server going down).

Given that reading mail directly via an NFS-mounted spool predates remote mail 
access via POP/IMAP, I'm not convinced you're going to find a solution you 
consider "mature", so you might wish to re-evaluate this criteria.  :-)

How many hours of unexpected downtime has this mail server had over the past 
year?  What is your budget?  Are you willing to pay for a SAN and fibre 
channel connectivity for parallel mailreader boxes, rather than going the NAS 
route, then?

-- 
-Chuck