Re: [exim] heartbeat load balancing and exim

On Wed, Apr 02, 2008 at 11:17:31AM -0700, Jeroen van Aart wrote:
> Wouter Verhelst wrote:
> > Exim does not 'sort of' work with NFS. Exim works great with NFS. Even
> > if you want to write to mboxes over NFS, exim will not corrupt them
> > provided you set your transport up to use lock files rather than flock
>
> I am sorry but you perfectly point out why NFS would be a bad idea. It
> requires exim to work around NFS' flaws instead of just working, like
> when it'd access a real filesystem. How can you say exim works great
> with NFS if you have to set up your transport to use lock files rather
> than flock, or else files may become corrupted. That to me sounds like
> it does NOT work great, but works sort of, if you're careful and avoid
> the problems.

Doing mbox over NFS is a bad idea regardless of whether you use exim or
something else. If/when you want to do mail on NFS, Maildir is much
better. This is nothing exim-specific.

Having said that, if you are crazy and really really do want to do mbox
over NFS (which brings great risk for corrupting your mboxes, whether
you use exim or not), even then there are still ways to avoid corruption
as much as possible.

Saying that exim is bad because it handles a nearly impossible situation
in an almost-perfect way (as opposed to perfectly) seems rather silly to
me.

> In that same line of thought qmail works great IF you apply the 600 or
> so patches it needs to actually turn it into something resembling an MTA.

Sure. Having said that, qmail doesn't support mbox output; and if you
install it on NFS and have it write to Maildirs, then qmail works
flawlessly.

Exim can do Maildir and NFS; and it can even do mbox on NFS semi-safely.
That's more than you can say for most other MTAs.

--
<Lo-lan-do> Home is where you have to wash the dishes.
-- #debian-devel, Freenode, 2004-09-22