Email Clustering

[Steven Crothers]

Has anybody here dealt with email clustering? Preferably one of the *NIX mail servers instead of Exchange or anything like that. Trying to get some insight on b/w commits and storage. I've never personally put one together, but I'm looking to put one together with two redundant mail exchangers.

[KingJ]

Do you mean backup MX? So if your primary MX/Mail server goes down, it gets sent to a secondary one?

 

I'm not entirely sure on the setup of it, I have rollernet.us host my secondary MX and works fine if my primary mailserver goes down. Don't forget to setup secondary DNS too incase that goes down.

[Steven Crothers]

Basically I want to do this-

 

SMTP / POP3 / MX Machine - Chicago

|- MX - Dallas

 

I also want to be able to add more as I go pretty easy. Just looking for people who had experience to shoot me some ideas.

[maddanny]

this is not clustering

As KJ told, you just have to configure your Dallas MX as backup for your domain and redirect emails to your Chicago box.

 

But if you want real clustering, there are no real solution as opensource (or nothing very reliable). You can use Exchange 2007 (or 2003 with additional software), but there are some other softwares that're doing this too (maybe Communigate Pro ?)

[Steven Crothers]

Well what if Chicago goes offline, does that just mean the email will be queued up in Dallas until its brought back online?

[maddanny]

Yes. And the server will try every X mins to reach Chicago server to deliver them.

 

But you can do a low price cluster: you configure on each server the same domain (we call it game.com) and a local domain, game-chic.lan (on Chicago server) and game-dal.lan (on ... Dallas server) (not real domains, of course, so you'll have to configure static routes in MTA config or, better, configure it on your DNS servers but your MTA must use the only them).

 

On Chicago domain you'll configure the MTA to copy all incoming emails for @game.com to @game-dal.lan and on Dallas all @game.com will be sent to @game-chic.lan too.

So if an email sent to steven@game.com is received at Chicago server, you'll get the same on steven@game-dal.lan.

Now the must complicated part is to copy all emails @game-[chic/dal].lan to local @game.com box and you'll get same email to 2 mailboxes

 

If you have good servers a good solution is to use a MTA that have a SQL backend and use SQL replication to sync the servers (there are 2 or 3 related projects on freshmeat).

[Steven Crothers]

Yes. And the server will try every X mins to reach Chicago server to deliver them.

 

But you can do a low price cluster: you configure on each server the same domain (we call it game.com) and a local domain, game-chic.lan (on Chicago server) and game-dal.lan (on ... Dallas server) (not real domains, of course, so you'll have to configure static routes in MTA config or, better, configure it on your DNS servers but your MTA must use the only them).

 

On Chicago domain you'll configure the MTA to copy all incoming emails for @game.com to @game-dal.lan and on Dallas all @game.com will be sent to @game-chic.lan too.

So if an email sent to steven@game.com is received at Chicago server, you'll get the same on steven@game-dal.lan.

Now the must complicated part is to copy all emails @game-[chic/dal].lan to local @game.com box and you'll get same email to 2 mailboxes

 

If you have good servers a good solution is to use a MTA that have a SQL backend and use SQL replication to sync the servers (there are 2 or 3 related projects on freshmeat).

Now that was the insight I was looking for.

 

Thanks for that info, I'm going to be using it while I plan my email setup in the very near future here.