On Mon, 6 Sep 1999, Chris McCarthy wrote:
> My company wants to provide users on the internet with a free email
> service ([EMAIL PROTECTED]). We'll be starting off with about
> 3,000 users, potentially growing up to 10,000 in the next 12 months.
It's quite common nowadays. Just keep in mind that Linux (and SCO
OpenServer) supports only 32767 userids (~32200 users by default) due of
uid_t's definition (signed short). Other systems (as Sun Solaris, HP/HPUX,
IBM/AIX) supports much more (2147483648) because of defining uid_t as int.
Thus, if your planned system would use more than 30000 users, you could
decide if you want to use a tougher system, or use virtual hosting.
> How feasible is it to create a passwd/shadow entry for each user,
> providing them with POP/IMAP access ? (or maybe just pop if imap puts
> too much load on the server).
In modern systems this data is cached or accessed by a database manager.
For example if you turn off pam in RedHat 6.0, you can use the database
feature of /var/db (it hashes /etc/group, /etc/passwd, /etc/shadow and rpc,
protocols, services list). You can turn'em on and off by
/etc/nsswitch.conf. If you want to use these gdbm hashes, I recommend you
to use a non-pam distribution of Linux.
Or you can use LDAP or SQL authentication system for virtual serving. This
sounds OK, but beware of spreading out authorization and authentication
data. This way you can easily set up a POP3 daemon on an ethernet alias
port with your special checkpassword (with PAM and the pam_ldap module).
Maybe this is the most cost-effective way if you want to give complete
solution to your users (POP3, maybe IMAP, central address book).
> Does this sound OK, or should we look at buying (or developing) hotmail
> style software instead ?
The web interface is the bottleneck. If you have enough resources to build
one, or you can hire someone to who has, that's good. There are a lot of
this kind of interface on the net, whcih can be good for you. BTW I don't
encourage you to use web interface, unless it's a requirement. I like an
IMAP-like service much better.
--
Regards: Kevin (Balazs)
