[KLUG Members] Qmail-ldap + netapp results

[Joe Baker]

On Thursday 07 July 2005 02:18 pm, Adam bultman wrote:
> Good afternoon, KLUGgers.
>
> I've recently completed the finished 'cluster' setup of qmail+ldap and a
> network appliance.
>
> By and large, the slower 800 MHz servers make GREAT smtp servers, and
> with the network appliance, they are able to more than reliably and
> quickly deliver mail.  I've been able to get them to back up a bit by
> pumping them with 20,000 messages (slowdowns aided by heavy logging on
> the blade with the ldap server) but they'll crank through the messages
> reliably and quickly.  Besides- SMTP isn't instantaneous - you don't get
> users complaining if it takes a few extra minutes to deliver a piece of
> mail.  Having multiple servers handle mail complicates debugging a bit,
> but it spreads out load and gives a bit more protection in the case of a
> failure (i.e. no total blackout).
>
> IMAP is another story; the low amount of RAM and the slow processor
> speed causes IMAP to be a bit pokey when you have a large mailbox. I can
> only assume that of the users there are using the current mailserver,
> there's got to be a lot of people with large mailboxes.  I installed
> courier-imap-ldap on a spare Xeon box (dual 2.66 GHz) and forwarded a
> port over SSH, and things went much more smoothly, hardly touching the
> processor.  Throwing more slow systems at IMAP won't fix the problem,
> but throwing a couple fast ones will.
>
> In the end, qmail-ldap is unbelievably cool.  A bit more functionality
> in phpLDAPadmin would be nice, but isn't vital.  We do all our LDAP
> admin through the command line and ldif files anyway.  If we deploy for
> everybody, we'll probably write a wobject for webGUI and have that done
> anyway.     The Netapp makes deploying new imap+pop and smtp servers a
> cinch.  Courier-IMAP could do with some caching like cyrus does, but you
> can't have everything.  The sky didn't fall like some people predicted,
> although it drizzled at times.
>
I'd recommend going with Cyrus for IMAP serving.  I've been a big fan of IMAP 
for years.  Unfortunately, I started out with UW-IMAP, then migrated to 
courier, and now I'm moving to Cyrus (although I'm paying tuffmail.com to 
host it for me now.)  I've been entrigued by the kolab-server project.  They 
are storing contacts, calendar events, todo items  in imap folders on the 
Cyrus systems.  KMail and Korganizer work with Cyrus very well.  

Anyway that's my two cents from across lake Michigan.

-Joe Baker (Milwaukee & St. Louis)