On Thu, 14 Feb 2002, Russell Coker wrote:
> > This is becomming not scalable, and I want to start to use a mail
> > server with auth based on sql, using MySQL for example. I am thinking in
> > use a debian woody( I'll wait till woody becomes stable), with sendmail as
> > smtp server, but I am not sure about the pop3 daemon I have to use.
The problem I encountered is that if you want to have users with shell
access, you need some mapping from the (whatever: LDAP, MySQL...)
database to the uid/gid. That is needed for file permissions etc.
So, if you want to have shell access, there's no way round /etc/passwd I
guess. AFAIK there's some PAM modules for Novell that will auto-adduser if
a user doesn't exist in the passwd database yet.
If you want to have a sealed e-mail box, you could probably use
Cyrus-IMAPd which also provides a pop server. I know that it is being used
in several universities in Austria, with 10000 or more users. So I guess
it scales quite well. Of course installing Cyrus for the first time is not
as plug-and-pray as just throwing in your favourite pop3 server, but
there's a script included that will convert the mailboxes to Cyrus'
format.
> The best way of killing performance on a POP server is using /var/spool/mail.
> Use Maildir storage and you'll get huge performance gains.
I can only support this opinion. I had a user from the publishing
business, using Outlook on a Macintosh. His Inbox was ~280MB, the mail
server machine had 256MB of RAM and he was coming in from abroad, so a
quite unstable and slow network connection. It was a real nightmare,
because he couldn't delete messages with Outlook, and ssh connections
started to die because of the high packet loss...
Alex
--
"Forgive me, but I'm talking to a politician."
John Simpson, BBC World
