Re: Postfix Mailgateway Installation

Thanks Stan and Pavel for your responses.

On Tue, Jun 12, 2012 at 2:39 PM, Stan Hoeppner <stan@...> wrote:

On 6/12/2012 1:54 AM, santosh malavade wrote:

> I am in the process of installing mailgateway server.
> Which option of installation should I use ?  Installing from source code or
> precompiled packages.

First, what message load are you designing this gateway to handle?  One
msg/sec?  Ten msgs/sec?  How many downstream mailboxes?  Do you plan to
use a local address table, remote LDAP, RAV?

This server will be accepting messages for nine domains.  During peak hours 25msg/sec.  5000 Users.   Yes, relay recipient maps will point to local hash file.   The internal servers will use LDAP for getting the mailbox location.  I did not understand what is RAV means.  Pls. elaborate.
 

> The red hat currently provides package

> postfix-2.6.6-2.2.el6_1:2.x86_64<https://rhn.redhat.com/rhn/software/packages/details/Overview.do?pid=633415>

In your case I'd recommend sticking with the RHEL Postfix package unless
there is a specific feature you know you need that's only available in a
later release.

> OS :  RHEL 6
> RAM : 8 GB

It is always mentioned to move to the latest version of the software, considering the features the latest release provides.    I wanted to understand, when the current stable release of POSTFIX will be provided by RHEL as package.

 

8GB RAM is overkill for an smtp gateway.  1GB is usually more than
sufficient.  More important is disk IOPS capability.

I was considering 4GB.  However, this is what is given to me. :-)     We may consider awstat on the same machine. 
Disk IOPS - need to understand this.  I will spend some time on it.
 

> Hard Disk : 500 GB

And it appears you have a 7.2k RPM single disk.   This should be
sufficient if your message rate is ~30/sec or less.  And 500GB is far
more than sufficient for your spool.  10GB of spool space is usually far
more than sufficient for a light duty gateway.  I'd recommend adding
another one and mirror the two for redundancy.

are we saying /var  should be 10 GB and RAID configuration.

 

> CPU : Intel Xenon 2.4 GHz

This should be fine.  An smtp spool is disk bound, not CPU bound.  In
the absence of horribly misconfigured content filtering software this
CPU should be able to handle hundreds of msgs/sec without breaking a sweat.

we will not be using content filtering
 

> How do I go about partitioning ?  Will there be any benefits of having
> Logical Partitions ?  Will it have impact on the performance ?

Are you referring to LVM?  It will gain you nothing on an SMTP gateway
and simply increase complexity needlessly.  The RHEL default partition
scheme should be fine, unless it gives you less than 20GB for /var.

I have recently come across a vendor who was insisting non LVM based configuration siting performance reasons.   Hence, I thought checking it with the list.  I personally feel the LVM provides the flexibility of resizing. 


Is there any detailed documentation ?


Rgds,


Santosh

 

--
Stan