[Mailman-Developers] A thought on SMTPHOST

[Daniel J. Cody]

On Mon, 4 Mar 2002, Chuq Von Rospach wrote:
> 
> So I'm getting ready to start what's known as my "smurf army" in my design
> documents: a farm of small, inexpensive, fast machines set up specifically
> to deliver mail as quickly as possible. (the first three are ultra-5's,
> mostly because another project went away and we got them for free....)
> 
> And I've been looking at the best way to interface all of these with the
> delivery boxes. With Mailman, that means SMTPHOST.
> 
> The way SMTPHOST is set up, to implement a smurf army would require setting
> up a round robin DNS of the various hosts. That'll work, but... If one of
> the boxes goes down for some reason, some percentage of Mailman deliveries
> would fail when it hits that part of the round robin, unless I tweak the
> round robin constantly, which would require setting up a DNS box among the
> smurf to delegate the round robin to instead of the corporate DNS, which is
> not a good idea on any number of levels for us...
[snip]

fwiw, i only have about 10% of the traffic you do Chuq, but I've been 
using this method with success on 2 low end pentiums with linux, and a 
sparc5 with openbsd all running postfix for a bit over a year now.. the 
round robin method has worked well for me, but making Mailman MX aware 
sounds like an improvement. just some thoughts :)

.djc.