[tech] Sane mail

[Mark Tearle]

On Fri, 1 Nov 2002, Nick Bannon wrote:

> On Fri, Nov 01, 2002 at 03:14:10PM +0800, Mark Tearle wrote:
> > No, that's dumb.  mooneye is exposed to the world and not the worlds
> > most reliable machine in any of it's nine lives.  The disk for the
> > mail spool is on morwong, the users are on morwong, Chewbacca's a
> > wookie, it just makes sense for mail to delivered on morwong.
>
> No, that's a kneejerk. mooneye is already exposed to the world and
> you're still dependent on it to get your mail through in any scenario.
> Currently, you're dependent on morwong as well.

Depends on how we order our MX's/firewall smtp to morwong.
We could set up our MX's as following:

10 morwong
20 mooneye
30 asclepius

(and have a firewall rule stopping asclepius by default talking
 to morwong (which we can quickly drop if mooneye goes boom))

> FWIW, many (most?) of the users are not on morwong (though I,
> personally, am).

But morwong is where the mail is to be stored, and ergo, where the
MDA (mail delivery agent) should run.

morwong is also where the home directories where you save your mail
thus there is some sense in having the spools there too.

> The point of the standalone mail server is to simplify the system and
> reduce the dependencies.  If it works on mooneye it can also work on a
> locked down dedicated box with mirrored disks, firewalled to the hilt,
> and the server never has to touch an mbox format file again.

Good solution, wrong problem.  It's just not a good solution to the
the usage scenarios we have in UCC.

Yours
Mark
-- 
Mark Tearle - mark at tearle.com "Happiness is not a lifestyle, happiness is"
                                  - greeting card
linux.conf.au 2003         - The Australian Linux Technical Conference
http://conf.linux.org.au/    22nd - 25th January 2003 in Perth