[OpenAFS] Using OpenAFS for implementing mail servers

[Tim Showalter]

Jatin Nansi <linuxguru@india.com> writes:

> > > locking.  We take a different approach and assign each user to one
> > > and only one POP server, but use DNS to give them names of the
> > > form username.pobox.stanford.edu so that we can move things
> > > between POP servers if necessary.
> > 
> > MIT does a similar thing (except MIT uses Hesiod instead of raw DNS
> > for the pobox lookup).  I would not recommend using AFS for mail
> > storage (except by the end user).  Use POP or IMAP for users to
> > connect, and just load-balance the machines by splitting which users
> > use which servers.

> thanks for the information.  but unfortunately, our corporate policy
> here is that the users must get username@domainname.com, thats it,
> nothing else.  and i still need to load balance, and ensure that the
> mail folders on all servers are in sync at all times.  so now how do i
> do it??

I don't see how the configuration that has been suggested by Russ and
Derek conflicts with the idea of having only a single email address.

Have your MX machines route to userid.pop.domain.com based on userid
(most large sites seem to be using LDAP now).

This technichally means that userid@userid.pop.domain.com is a
valid email address as well as userid@domain.com, but I doubt that's an
issue, since you probably have a firewall and your POP server is
probably on the inside of it.  (If this isn't true, don't publish the
email addresses and no one will notice -- I know of a few sites using
this approach and it seems to have worked well for them).

I will refrain from plugging my company's (Mirapoint) fine, high-quality
mail server products.  I'd also like to not plug IMAP at this point,
although I'll note that it's difficult to get most mail clients to read
AFS (that idea never really got out of CMU and it's been dying a long
time there).

Tim