Hi,
I have had a few problems recently with my router/server locking up and
I was thinking about reducing the load on it by moving as much as
possible to another machine and making the server more reliable. I know
I could just DNAT port 25 to another machine, but that creates two
points of failure. My thinking was therefore to have a simple
postscreen/postfix server relaying to another machine which would do
content filtering (amavis/spamassassin) and mailboxes etc. If the main
server goes down then I could either just queue emails on the relay or
have a backup server on yet another machine.
My question is: is it worth it? I understand that I need to do some
processing on the relay (e.g. postscreen) because once through the
relay, my server will not know to block emails/connections from unwanted
sources. If content filtering is not done on the relay it will reduce
the load but are there any disadvantages I have not considered?
Finally, if the main server goes down, I guess the relay will keep
messages until it returns just as well as a backup server, so it is
probably not necessary to have the backup as well? I already have an
external backup in case the whole thing goes down (thanks Virgin for
testing my backup provider. Without you I would never know it worked).
Thanks in advance,
Robert
