On Thu, 2009-05-28 at 15:20 -0400, Scott Lewis wrote: > On May 28, 2009, at 2:59 PM, Steve wrote: > > > Perhaps you can do the same to support your 1980's view of systems > > administration? You need to get some help with that temper of yours. > > It's the handrail of the crippled mind. > > I lurk more than post here mostly as a facet of being in awe of the > amount of knowledge already present, but can't resist. I currently > manage a cluster of anti-spam gateways (on-site and off-site), an > Exchange server, an Exchange front end server, a disaster recovery > Exchange instance (serves our internal employees), a Zimbra cluster as > well as an off-site Zimbra standby server (server our franchise > employees), two mailing list servers to ensure that if either of two > of my departments that send regular emails do something stupid, only > they get blocked while I sort it out with the RBLs, a cluster of mail > archiving servers, three Postfix servers that serve as internal > gateways routing mail to my various other servers since our Barracuda > spam appliances can't function as true gateways, and probably another > server I can't even recall right now. > > Sorry - should I have that all on one box? I don't think that would be the best plan in your circumstance. However, anyone who uses Barracuda Appliances will be aware of the fact they offer a cheap (and nasty) load balancer - which you can (and people do) deploy in High Availability mode. Behind this you can pile real servers, all offering different services. For example, you could put 10 Barracuda 'Spam & Virus Firewalls' behind them on port 25. You could also put half a dozen webservers there too. The point being that to the outside world they will all resolve to one IP - that of the load balancer. So mail.example.com, www.example.com (and probably ftp.example.com) appear as hosts pointing to the exact same place.
As for the Barracuda's not acting as true mail gateways, they are not meant to. They are an filter. People dream up other uses for them, but they are just a simple relay filter. Postfix, Clam, Spamassassin, Amavis. It's all Open Source, it's all free - but that's another subject. > > Look, some of the replies here may be terse... but most of the help > comes from a fairly modern base of expertise. The guy is often rude and his responses of the 'grunt' variety. On top of that he tends to become abusive when wrong. This cannot go unchallenged. I would guess (and that is all it is) that there are millions to billions of small businesses out there, with a single static IP presented to the outside world. That IP will resolve to their mail and web server via there gateway and that will probably be just one machine. Here is one example; http://www.microsoft.com/smallbusiness/products/server/default.aspx#Evaluate Wonder how many copies of that they have sold? In fact, with virtualisation taking off the way it has, it is now more than possible that a single machine is hosting many virtual machines which in turn can be hosting many services on a virtual IP. It's the failure to spot and adapt to trends like this because the way of the 1980's 'is the law' that leads to entirely useless, rude and incorrect answers.
