The Network People Support Forums

I have read the latest qmail documentation, and used it in the past to setup my personal email server (works great!).  But I now need to setup a business email system as part of a new business I am starting.  What I would like to do is seperate the dns, web and mail functions to different boxes if practical.  This would allow me to configure redundent systems and prevent lost of one box from killing all my important functions.  So has anyone placed the qmail, web and dns on seperate servers.  Is there a good howto/document on this particular setup?

Jim

jims2321

I have read the latest qmail documentation, and used it in the past to setup my personal email server (works great!).  But I now need to setup a business email system as part of a new business I am starting.  What I would like to do is seperate the dns, web and mail functions to different boxes if practical.  This would allow me to configure redundent systems and prevent lost of one box from killing all my important functions.  So has anyone placed the qmail, web and dns on seperate servers.  Is there a good howto/document on this particular setup? Jim

The O'Reilly book 'qmail' talks about doing this a bit.

First off, there's absolutely nothing involved in doing DNS on a different box --- no relevance what-so-ever...

As far as web/mail being different -- the recommended solution is using NFS in the book to mount the mail data as a drive on the web box --
They emphasize that you should really be doing Maildirs (which the toaster does) -- and how in that case it should be okay for you to be writing a single mail file message while reading another.

Thats as far as squirelmail, or whatever webbased solution you'd like.

Web stats through log analysis might be a hit and miss -- not sure how NFS is gonna do the file locking on the current file being written to.

The only difficulty I could imagine might be trying to use qmailadmin -- I'm quite sure it executes the local copies of the vpopmail commands --
-- if you mounted the proper drives, at the proper paths, and had the proper support libs (or just installed another copy of the proper executables and somehow had them use the NFS mounted copy of the vpopmail dir to do the changes... might work --
as I said though -- thats gonna be difficult.

Do you really have that much trouble with machines that you need to separate them out that much?

Please explain further specifically which components you'd like on each box, and we can go into it more.  Pickup the qmail book.

IIRC Squirrelmail just runs over IMAP so you wouldnt even need to NFS mount the maildir on the WWW box.  Although, as LX pointed out, maildirs are pretty NFS friendly. I think youd be more likely, though rare, to run into NFS hanging on stale NFS dirs as opposed to the traditional Mailbox locking problems.