Another point to consider is that you should install multiple boxen.
The large box would be the primary MX, responsible for local mail
delivery and the POP/IMAP daemons only.
The client boxen, if they are not running a MTA, should send all
outgoing mail to a `dedicated' SMTP box. And very importantly, you
should have at least a secondary and tertiary MX box.
These two or three boxen need be no more powerful than a 64M (ram is
cheap) P100 w/ a 1.5G to 2G IDE disk (use hdparm to turn on dma and
32-bit I/O). They can also double as secondary DNS servers, or as
backups for some other, relatively low impact, server.
Either the secondary or tertiary MX box can easily double as the
outgoing SMTP box, since they will only handle incoming mail when the
primary is unreachable, and then dump it to the primary when it can
again be reached.
With the exception of the outgoing SMTP box, presuming your primary MX
box remains stable, the secondary/tertiary MX boxen will get little
traffic, so disk failure from constant use should be unlikely; that
said, if perfect reliability of mail service is sufficiently important
to justify the slight expence, use two IDE disks (primary on each of
the IDE ports) and software raid1. That way, if a disk does fail, the
mqueue will survive.
Given the above offloading, the PII mailserver at mt ISP (primary MX,
IMAP, POP) services somewhere between 6k and 10k users as fast and
efficiently as one cold possibly wish. I believe they currently run a
2.1.5x kernel and software raid5 over two or three disks for
/var/spool/mail, with adaptec :( SCSI and, I think, 256M RAM.
Finally, for backups, get a DLT drive. Dan Quinlan put it best: `[they]
rock.'
-JimC
--
James H. Cloos, Jr.
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
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