[Mailman-Users] multiple hosts mounting mailman nfs

[Brad Knowles]

On 12/18/07, Troy Knabe wrote:

>  I have two smtp servers that we use dns round robin for load
>  balancing.  I can run it one server at a time, but I am running into
>  some pid lock file issues when I try to run them simultaneously.

Mailman is written in such a way that it should be as resistant as 
possible to problems that would be caused by mounting 
/usr/local/mailman on NFS, but there's only going to be so much that 
you can do.  It will definitely use lock files to try to keep things 
straight.

The other alternative is to keep the /usr/local/mailman/qfiles and 
certain other  directories mounted locally-only on each of the 
machines, and then to have the /usr/local/mailman/archives and 
certain other directories mounted shared via NFS.  This way, 
individual incoming messages will be processed locally on a given 
server, although the archives and other stuff will be shared from a 
single central location.  This should minimize most lock contention.


For your mail servers, you want to make sure that you don't try to 
share via NFS the /var/spool/mqueue type of directories, because most 
MTAs (e.g., sendmail, postfix, Exim, etc...) do not do well at all if 
those transactional directories are shared across multiple machines. 
You can share user mailboxes on /var/spool/mail via NFS, and there 
are certain Mailbox formats that make that sort of thing easier and 
more robust.  But that's not the transactional queue files for the 
MTA.

-- 
Brad Knowles <brad at shub-internet.org>
LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu>