[OpenAFS] mail spool on AFS

[Russ Allbery]

Enesha Fairluck <enesha@sunflower.org> writes:

> Forcing imap at this time is not an option.  We are in an ISP
> environment and users are barely able to comprehend and use their pop3,
> and out webmail solution for their mail.  We also have our servers
> seperated in as much as we have one that does the virus scanning, which
> saves to a directory, and another machine picks it up for delivery, and
> the webmail service is another one altogether, though it does in fact
> use imap for it's access.  Currently we are using NFS to make this, and
> several other directories, constantly available.  We are having, what I
> can only hope, are some file locking issues centered around the NFS and
> had hoped that AFS would solve our problems in this respect, and allow
> us to move to the next phase of our expansion.  Are there specific
> reasons that mail on AFS is a bad idea?

Yes.  It almost certainly won't solve your locking problems, it will
probably make them worse, and you'll get brand new serious performance
problems for your trouble.

In this sort of situation, I'd recommend either an NFS appliance or some
sort of SAN.  Preferrably the latter if you can, since any sort of shared
network file system tends to die under the load of mail, but people have
had a lot of luck with NetApps and similar boxes and large mail
installations.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>