From: loonux fc (loonux@gmail.com)
Date: Tue Nov 23 2004 - 12:12:00 EST
Greetings,
I am presently getting ready to build a new set of mail servers for
our organization. I will be using a set of Netra AC200 units [500Mhz]
with 2Gb of RAM and dual 36Gb SCSI disks running on Solaris 8. Due to
the nature of our mail product, I must use sendmail as my MTA. Given
this constraint, I am looking to optimize this system as much as
possible in terms of filesystem layout (RAID/mirroring) and sendmail
configuration tweaks.
Each system presently handles upwards of 200,000 messages a day. I
would like this to be able to scale as far as possible. Here is how I
plan to proceed, and I'd welcome any comments and feedback that you
can give me. After I have placed the systems into production I will
write up a summary and post to the list.
Since the systems will be installed 3500 miles away from our main
facility, I would like to make them as resilient as possible. I am
planning on using disksuite (whatever it is called these days) to
perform RAID0 mirroring between the two 36Gb drives. Accordingly, I
would create a rather large /var with more inodes than default, since
mail spool files are generally small and copious. I'm wondering,
however, if using disk striping would be a better decision (for /var,
anyway) since the filesystem will incur lots of reads and writes. My
concern with striping is that if one disk fails, how easily will I be
able to remotely recover the machine having it use just one disk until
I get another disk shipped out? And are there any other performance
penalties that I might incur here?
As far as sendmail goes, I will most likely be compiling my own
version of sendmail 8.13.1 and playing with some of the new options
for fine tuning of queue runners and the like. I figure that I will
have some wiggle room here since our current performance isn't that
bad (with 8.11.7p1+SUN running a fairly standard configuration).
Anyway, I would appreciate any feedback or experience in dealing with
busy mail servers and RAID/striping. Thank you!
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