[OpenAFS] Replica sites

[Troy Benjegerdes]

On Tue, May 10, 2005 at 09:57:40PM +0100, ed wrote:
> On Tue, 10 May 2005 16:17:42 -0400 (EDT)
> Stephen Brown <sbrown7@umbc.edu> wrote:
> 
> > That's three dirs per mail folder -- with one file per message within.
> > It really can add up when folks keep their e-mail for years...
> 
> ./tmp and ./new are small dirs, ./cur is the biggie. 
> 
> Qmail's vpopmail system is useful, that once you have about 100 domains
> on the system it places them in ./domains/, ./domains/0/ and
> ./domains/1/ ... ./domains/N filing system per 100. But the problem is,
> I don't want a single system that could fail, and I don't want a huge
> hardware budget, even if it takes me 4 months to find a solution it's
> more worthwhile as I can apply it to other internal requirements where
> data is possibly brought down through a single failure.

FYI, I'm running courier and using maildirs in the users's home
directory for mail delivery.

That way you have 1 volume per user.

There are some gotchas, but I've been running this in a small
environment for quite awhile now. I think this could be all cleaned up
with a few patches to courier and some more robust AFS file access
regression tests.  (delivering mail to maildirs and serving out imap is
appently a good way to find race conditions in the afs kernel module)