What's the best possible email failover solution

[Andy Harrison]

On Mon, 21 Jun 2004 13:20:06 -0400, Bill Moran <wmoran at potentialtech.com> wrote:
> 
> Hey,
> 
> I know questions like this get asked a lot, but I'm going to be really specific.
> 
> I know how to set up failover with a backup MX.  That's not what I'm looking
> for.  We have a cyrus-imap server with lots of users connecting via IMAP,
> while everything gets backed up, this only happens once a night.  Thus, if the
> server were to go up in smoke right before the backup occurred, we'd lose
> something like 23 hours worth of emails.
> 
> Does anyone have a solution to provide real-time mirroring of IMAP folders?
> I don't mind manual intervention to get the thing running again, I just want
> to ensure that if an email is received, it's on both machines and can't get
> lost.  Is there a way to get real-time replication of cyrus (I'm no cyrus
> guru, another fellow set this up)
> 
> I'm not tied to Cyrus either, if there's another solution, I'd be happy to
> implement it.
> 
> I have an idea ... by using Dovecot with PostgreSQL storing the actual mail
> folders, with Slony installed to provide real-time replication of the Postgres
> database ... I don't know if Dovecot is able to store the actual mail folders
> in Postgres yet, though ... Anyone?


Real time mirroring would be a looooong way to go for very little
return.  You'd be much better off with some sort of NAS in a raid
config, even if it were home grown, to store the spools.  Then you can
have as many front-ends as you want, just auth with LDAP or something.


-- 
Andy Harrison