On Thu, Jan 10, 2002 at 02:06:18PM -0600, Thomas J. Hudak wrote: > 2 Boxen, go with 2 PIII 800's, each with 512M ram and a 10 gig ide > drive. Remember, the machines don't need to be powerful, the speed comes > from the IO backend and the network capabilities. > Just for input, PIII 800's are around $105 (133mhz bus) or $115 for the 100mhz bus chips, you'll also have a hard time finding slot 1 motherboards anymore, I'd personally go with a 1.3Ghz P4 (if you're one of those people who hate AMD) or a 1.4Ghz Athlon (266mhz bus) for $94 (I'm an AMD lover). Good prices can be found at http://www.pricewatch.com > Research raid arrays, smaller arrays, ie 60-120 Gig are not as expensive > as you may think, otherwise you may just want an external JBOD full of > big disks. > > You'll want scsi cards in your two machines so you can connect each to > the array/JBOD at the same time. > > Use a stable variety of linux for your servers, I'd say debian stable > due to it's reliable nature and ease of upgradeability. > > Make your array/JBOD into an LVM logical volume, that way you'll be able > to expand it's size on-the-fly when you choose to add more storage > resulting in less downtime. Use GFS (www.sistina.com <-- plug plug) as > your file-system as this is what it was designed for, reliability and > redundancy. Without getting to nitty-gritty, you should be able to setup > a secure redundant mini-cluster able to fit the needs of a high-volume > smtp relay with the ability to easily expand it's capabilities in the > future. > Figuring for 32K block size, each message claimed to be 7K, he could easily store 3,750,000 messages, with $MAIL_DAEMON set to just expire messages not delivered after say, 12 hours (he said after 3-4 they were useless) that's quite a bit of room to grow. (assuming a 120G drive dedicated to mail) I'm not sure how important raid would be for long-term data reliability considering his comments about it being useless after a short amount of time. Also, I would recommend a caching nameserver on a nearby (ie, lan) box with a lot of memory for quick repeated lookups of MX entries and whatnot. -- Matthew S. Hallacy CACU, PWGCS, and BOFH Certified http://techmonkeys.org/~poptix GPG public key 0x01938203