Re: [exim] Preferred virtual domain handling

On Jan 11, 2005, at 3:12 PM, Mike Oliveri wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> I was just wondering what most of you preferred for handling multiple
> virtual
> domains in Exim. I've got a basic setup right now with some simple
> forwarding
> using a simple lsearch and some config files, but we're looking at
> migrating
> another server from Windows to FreeBSD and many of that system's
> domains are
> stored on that machine, not forwarded.
>
> For example, when customer jdoe@??? fetches their email, I'd
> like them
> to be able to put in mail.example.com or similar as their server
> addresses
> and use jdoe (or jdoe@???) as their username.
>
> Will lsearch handle it or will I need something a little more
> sophisticated?
> Any recommendations would be greatly appreciated.

It's probably non-standard, but on my linux (debian) system I've found
that the following scheme is easy to administer.
- /var/vdomains - is the root for the virtual domain data.
- /var/vdomains/<domain>/etc/aliases - for domain-wide aliases such as
a mail reflector.
- /var/vdomains/<domain>/users/<user>/aliases - for user specific
aliases.
- /var/vdomains/<domain>/users/<user>/Maildir - for mail stored on the
server.
- and so on.

The name server (bind) contains A records for:
- imap.<domain>
- smtp.<domain>
and an MX record pointing to the virtual smtp.<domain> server.

Virtual user names are all of the form <user>@<domain>. I happen to
use MySQL for user/pwd storage, but I don't see why you couldn't use a
/var/vdomains/<domain>/etc/mailpwd file.

What I like best about this scheme is that I do not commingle either
virtual domain data or configuration. That makes it easy to manage
backups as well as (re)distributing the domains among the hw. This
scheme also handles other services pretty well--e.g. httpd via
/var/vdomains/<domain>/www.

It makes it real easy to manage backups as well as (re)distributing
vdomains across the hardware resources.

So far it's worked quite well--though I'll admit it hasn't experienced
any "significant" stress tests.