load balancing: mail server
 

i'm new to linux, a student in india.
carrying a project on load balancing of mail servers
i'm using qmail(as mta). i've installed it from the 'free on net'
package-qinstall-1.0.tar.gz. how to use it, configure it?
do i need a mail server in the lan to use it?
may i get the information of how does it work, so that i can write a load balancing program.

It sounds to me like you want to colaborate with the guy who started this thread earlier today - http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...threadid=57270

For setting up qmail - you want to read the documentation that comes with Qmail to start with, and have a good read of http://www.qmail.org

As for "do i need a mail server in the lan to use it?" - qmail is a mail server!

cheers

Jamie...

mail server load balancing project
 

dear jamie,
qmail is an mta, i think its not mail server.
now, i have installed qmail, but how to use it to mail
a member within a LAN, is there a need of separate mail server.
next, do i get any books which are on qmail.

When you talked about "mail server" and "qmail" in the same question I assumed you were referring to an SMTP server. Lets start being a little more precise!

There is a link on http://www.qmail.org to books about qmail have a read of the site there are loads of great resources.

I take it that you are taking about setting up a server that will allow user to collect their email yeah? Like a POP or IMAP server? The Courier IMAP server seems quite popular with Qmail users as it directly support maildir's. What exactly do you require? Are you currently using maildir's to sore mails, or traditional mbox mail boxes, or something else? Do you want people to be able to check their email from any machine on your LAN (IMAP is good for this) or do you want to save disk space on the server that holds your user's mail boxes (not necessarily the same as your SMTP server or POP/IMAP server!) by making your user's download all their mail to their local machine (POP method of doing things)?

Just having qmail installed and running will allow you to send mail to user@somewhere.net which will be accepted by the server and stored somewhere. Effectively you can email anyone within the LAN and that mail will sit in the maildir/mbox of that user until its read somehow. This doesn't address at-all how they will read their mail.

cheers

Jamie...

dear jamie,
with ur series of questions, i felt that our thoughts will converge this time.
i make these assumptions, in my project 'load balancing of mail servers',
1) there is only network on this earth, it is my lan, no iternet nothing.
2) users of lan communicate with each other thro' mails.
3) (not necessary but) users use qmail as transfer agent.

my question is when load(or number) of mails increase( or mail requests increase). how to balance
it. should i configure a mail server(or cluster of servers) in the lan (like hotmail server or so).
if it is required, should it have mail transfer agent like qmail. if qmail is there on it, then by understanding its operation, i may be capable of balancing the load on set of mail servers by directing all incoming mail requests following some balancing algorithms.
am i clear? suggest me something.

u had given link abt qmail, it is useful, thanq.

cheers.........

bye

Unfortunately I've got no experience of load balancing SMTP relays, and I can't say that I've ever seen it done apart from with MX records with the same priority (which is mentioned in the thread I linked to in my first post) - which doesn't really load balance; so long as the sending MTA supports a MX will be selected ramdomly...

cheers

Jamie...