Re: [Exim] What is better OS for Exim

On Wed, 2004-07-28 at 04:32, Jeyanolipavan, Raviraj wrote:
> We are in the process of upgrading our exim mail hubs
> Currently we are using 3 SUN Ultra10's.
> Which are heavily loaded, as our mails filtered through Message labs,
> which only send mail to one Hub? With one fallback

I am not sure I entirely understand this.

You have 3 servers, but only one of them actually receives mail (as
forwarded by Message Labs)?


> We might have to use load balancer to receive mails on all hubs. Which
> is an option?

Myeah, maybe.. It depends a little on how MessageLabs decide which
machine to forward your mail to.

I presume that they don't actually use the MX records of your domain,
since these would have to point to _their_ machines, not yours.
Nevertheless, if you provide them with a FQDN (i.e. not an IP address),
you can actually point that name to several IP addresses. That way, you
don't need a load balancer, and may actually end up getting better
performance.

In any case, they must provide _some_ way for you to use a pool of
machines to receive mail, otherwise they are not of much use.


> We are planning to move to Linux probably SUSI, purely on the bases of
> cost oh Hardware. What would you recommend? And advise?

Sure; x86 boxes give more overall performance for each dollar than
Sun/Sparc machines do. And Linux generally performs better on x86 than
does Solaris.

That said, for Exim I would probably choose Debian over SuSE. The Exim
packages for Debian are extremely well made (thanks Andreas!) with
"-light" and "-heavy" versions, depending on whether you want such
things as Exiscan-ACL included. You have the option of splitting the
configuration file into small files within subdirectories
(/etc/exim/conf.d/acl, /etc/exim/conf.d/routers,
/etc/exim/conf.d/transports, and so on). Software such as SpamAssassin
and anti-virus scanners are included in the distribution (a mere
"apt-get install spamassassin" command away...).

That said, if your admins or yourself are already familiar with one
particular OS/Distribution, choose that.


-tor