Re: [gentoo-server] Comments on IMAP Server (cyrus/courier/dovecot)

[A. Khattri]

On Fri, 12 Aug 2005, kashani wrote:

> 	To the original poster you can go fully virtual by combining X auth
> method with Y backend with no local accounts. I'd go this route if the
> users that need local access to machine aren't likely to reside in a
> single email domain. In my case users that need access to the box work
> here so I made our domain local, gave ourselves local accounts, and our
> customers get to be virtual. The pros here that it's easy and you can
> leave your sshd, ftpd, etc configs alone.

Sure, that's fine when you have ONE server I agree - its just not
scaleable.

> Messing with a virtual mail
> system is sometimes hard enough the first time around for a lot of
> people and doing everything at once can be painful and most importantly
> cause sleep loss.

A long time ago, we too, used to have a single server with everything on
it running sendmail, IMAP, etc, and we had all sort of performance
problems because of the lack of scalability. It took us several months to
setup the new system - I wrote a *lot* of perl scripts to do this
migration away from sendmail to our qmail+vpopmail+MySQL setup.

In the end though it was worth it. We now have a scaleable solution and it
also enabled us to offer new packages that we couldn't do before.

>	Cons of course are that if you need to add local users from any other
> domain at some point in the future you're likely to need to re-engineer
> things a bit... or a lot. And also make the old local users start using
> their email as the login instead of their old username which is always a
> fun transition.

Making the local domain, the "default" domain in our mail system helped a
lot here. Of course, we spent a lot of time in support answering calls and
emails but things died down after a few weeks. Id rather do that than deal
with the constant problems of the old system.


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