Is it a good idea to run a mail server or web server diskless? The reason I want to do this is so that all of our server's files will be in one place which will make backups more convenient. Basically I am thinking of running one NFS/TFTP file server with disks, and those disks will contain the partitions for a web server, a mail server, and a login server which will all boot diskless. Is this safe and ok performance wise? Thanks.
It can be done, but there are enough gotcha's lurking that you should be careful. In particular, file locking [lockf(), flock(), fcntl()] via NFS is famously unreliable and you are strongly encouraged to use explicit dot-file-locking. The portion of sendmail which handles local delivery (mail.local) has some discussion of this, as does IMAP/POP software like the U-Wash stuff. Also be careful of stuff which uses the Berkeley DB.
Serving HTTP from a diskless machine is likely to work OK without too many problems, although watch out for the apache scoreboard (which wants to be unique and preferably local).
You can expect performance to be better with local drives than when using diskless systems. Performance for low amounts of traffic should be adequate.
-- -Chuck
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