[wplug] Thoughts & Considerations for email server

[Bryan J. Smith]

On Sun, 2007-08-19 at 14:31 -0400, Kevin Squire wrote:
> ALL THE RAID 5 COMMENTS -
>   It is a hardware setup, HP Smart Array e200/128 BBWC Controller

Hmmm, all it says is a 32-bit MIPS processor.  That could mean anything.
But at least it is some form of hardware RAID, although I've seen some
older designs that are bottlenecks (e.g., Intel IOP30x i960 products --
a common "example" software RAID-5 proponents use, not realizing that
it's 15-50x slower than modern Intel IOP33x X-Scale products).

What driver does it use?
  
>   The boss loves RAID 5 (it has saved his life more then once) and in
>   June when we started the setup, I did not know any different.  What 
>   you have given me is very interesting - will need to read some more,
>   and will take this info back to him.

RAID-0 is striping (no redundancy).

RAID-1 is mirroring (always ideal for everything).
RAID-3 is direct striping with dedicated parity disk (ideal desktop).
RAID-4 is block striping with dedicated parity disk (ideal large files).
RAID-5 is block striping with striped parity (ideal random file reads).
RAID-6 is RAID-5, but two stripes of parity.

You can also combine any of the above with RAID-0 -- e.g., RAID-10 is
mirroring and striping, and very popular.  Despite common believe, you
can have a 2-disc RAID-10, and many newer controllers do it.

>      We have been blacklisted by an ISP, 

Do you regularly check common blacklists for your subnet/servers?
And I assume you don't leave your SMTP relays open to just anyone.

>   We have also left the ports on the firewall open, so users CAN setup
>   their preferred email client (outlook, tbird, google, what ever) to
>   fetch the mail from this account.  We just are not going to answer
>   any support issues for those other clients.  We have a tech. dept.
>   of  4 people total, and most of us already have little to no free
>   time to answer all the support questions that could come in.  Of
>   course, we will support Squirrel issues. 

Do you use POP-SSL?  If so, what about that load?  If not, then do you
keep authentication separate from other access (like Blackboard)?
 


-- 
Bryan J. Smith         Professional, Technical Annoyance
mailto:b.j.smith at ieee.org   http://thebs413.blogspot.com
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        Fission Power:  An Inconvenient Solution