bsd:
> Hello folks,
>
> I am actually working for an African country where the electricity is
> not as stable as one could expect - even in the infrastructure of the
> historical telco operator_
>
> With all the care that we have been able to devote to this project,
> stability is still very very limited.
> So my idea was to create a fully redundant mail server.
>
> Ideally I would like people not to have to reconfigure anything on
> their client and to be able to connect to any resource available
> online (main African server or the backup one in Europe) - in a
> seamless way.
>
> Mail protocol has solved the issue of "backup" server (secondary MX)_
> but how can I achieve a real redundant server. Knowing that the "main
> server" and the "slave" are located 8000 Km away with poor link quality.
>
> What would be your aproach to solving this problem.
> Of course loosing mail is really an issue.
To get some ideas, see "TierStore: A Distributed File System for
Challenged Networks in Developing Regions" by Michael Demmer, Bowei
Du, and Eric Brewer.
Technology has a great role to play in developing regions, but
we need approaches that can tolerate limited networking and
power infrastructure. One promising model is to build applications
around a file system interface that provides eventual consistency
in these challenged network environments. Our resulting system,
TierStore, hides much of the complexity of intermittency and
simplifies the deployment of important applications such as
email, Web caching, and wiki-based collaboration.
http://www.usenix.org/publications/login/2008-06/
And other publications by the same people.
Wietse
