[Mailman-Users] Mailman on separate web and smtp load balanced farms.

[Matt Ruzicka]

First of all I apologize profusely for re-submitting this often talked
about topic.  I've been reading archives and googling and see that people
keep asking similar questions, but their needs end up being a bit
different so the answers offered up by the community don't quite answer
what I'm looking for (as I am understanding them).

My company is currently running three separate load balanced farms (all
FreeBSD) - one each for web (Apache), incoming mail (Postfix) and outgoing
mail (Postfix) behind virtual IP's.  The SMTP farms are split because we
do filtering on the incoming, while the outgoing servers have separate
user needs.  We would VERY much like to keep the web and incoming/outgoing
mail aspects separate.

I was wondering if anyone is actually doing something remotely similar to
this.

The outgoing aspect seems like a non-issue in that it appears we can
easily configure mailman to dump all mail over to the correct outgoing
mail server.  The issue that is confusing me is the separation of the web
and the incoming mail.

I have seen lots of talk about running mailman on two different servers,
and I did see a few other people offer information that indicated they are
using completely separate web and mail servers, but the threads always
seem to move towards solutions that merge some aspect of web and mail onto
one server.

I'm assuming I will be installing the mailman files onto an NFS partition,
which although there is a lot of legitimate concern, it sounds like the
Mailman developers have worked hard to address this.  Although I'm
concerned the load balanced farms, in addition to the separate servers,
might be too much for any NFS locking model as it relates to Mailman.

(The more I re-read this the more I realize I might be SOL.)

So the big questions:

1. How are people handling incoming mail to an SMTP server separate from
the web server?

2. How, if at all, are people handling the above question on a load
balanced incoming SMTP farm?

3. Do people have any recommendations/warnings for running Mailman on a
load balanced web farm?

4. Am I just over-complicating something (the install of Mailman) that
doesn't need to be as complicated as I'm thinking (our architecture model
aside. ;) )?

Thank you very much for your time and consideration of this issue, it is
very much appreciated.

Matthew Ruzicka - Systems Administrator
Front Range Internet, Inc.
matt at frii.net - (970) 212-0728

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