[afnog] FreeBSD Server Cluster

[Brian Candler]

On Tue, Nov 09, 2010 at 01:19:03PM +0300, Emmanuel Tessua wrote:
> i want to create a mailcluster on freebsd. Does anyone know how to
> accomplish this on freebsd??

You should start by defining what you're trying to achieve (specific number
of users or messages per hour?  Resilience in failure of any particular
hardware component?  Cross-site backup?)

There's an outline design for an NFS-based cluster in the Afnog workshop
materials.

http://www.ws.afnog.org/afnog2005/e1/mail/clustering.htm

The problem then reduces to one of building resilient NFS servers, which you
can either buy your way out of (e.g. Netapp), or you can build (e.g. using
drbd under Linux)

drbd is good because it handles failure scenarios gracefully. It may be
possible to cobble something similar together with ggated and mirroring
under FreeBSD.

Another backend option you could look at is Gluster/GlusterFS, which scales
and replicates automatically.

>From the FreeBSD point of view, on top of this is just commodity software:
exim or postfix for MTA, dovecot or courier for POP3/IMAP, many options for
webmail.

You'll need some sort of database for storing your user data (e.g.  LDAP or
MySQL), which itself will need to be resilient.  And you'll need to
interface this to your BSS/OSS for provisioning accounts and cancelling them
when people leave.

Regards,

Brian.