Thank you very much for your answer.
I have subscribed to the usenix discussion and have been able to
access the documents and read them.
Thaugh I think this is very promising for the environement we are
working with, It seems to be still a research laboratory project at
this stage.
I would be very happy to participate… if I had the time / money and
the engineers to dedicate to this projet.
I am looking for something a bit more practical that will allow me to
bypass the eventual problems we might face (such as power down of the
hosting facility).
In fact we are already facing these problems with a DNS server we have
just installed (hopefully It is not primary)… I have already deployed
the latest version of Postfix on this system with Postfix Admin /
dovecot - but It is totally un-usable because of frequent electricity
power-down…
So right now my dilema is :
---------------------------
--> Host these services in Europe (which is not very interesting in
the perspective of trying to develop / help my African clients).
--> Or host my services in the facility I was granted which is not
satisfying at all because It is so unstable… And my clients can't
access their mail.
Any "other" idea ?
Le 24 nov. 08 à 14:24, Wietse Venema a écrit :
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
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