On Jun 17, 2010, at 4:54 PM, Jean-Paul natola wrote:
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>> VIA C6 MB @ US$ 70. Twin 80 to 500 GB WD SATA on ATACONTROL, GMIRROR, or
>> SoftRAID are cheap. HK$ 1,300 1U case & PSU... typically 4 to 6 year component
>> life - HDD included, fans excluded. IPFW or PF has all one needs for clever
>> firewalling.
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> I was thinking a box along these lines, they even look like the barracuda appliance
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> http://www.asaservers.com/showpages.asp?pid=1291#
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> We actually use these boxes for our field offices in the remote regions, i just have them drop in a 3ware card 2 500 gig drives, up the ram to 2 gigs and a spare power supply and i get here shipped for ~800 USD
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I personally use FreeBSD 8.0 AMD/64 on top of a VMWare esxi 4 box, running as a VM guest with 2 GB RAM and 2 virtual procs has been just fine for us. Our exim box is strictly a mail gateway for all inbound and outbound mail in and out of our network. It handles all of our servers, clients servers, all of the same smtp connect time logic that Ron was talking about to handle mail filtering as well as SA and ClamAV processing for smtp data time operations. All on top of a very busy VM host. We successfully process anywhere from 10k-15k messages per day using very little resources. I guess my point is you don't need much with a *BSD OS (or any other small footprint *NIX OS) and the proper exim configuration. It's amazing how well the right configuration changes scale out with so few resources. The only thing I would say about your existing box is you might want to throw some additional memory in there because I'm assuming user mail is local to the box rather than a remote config like mine and you're running additional services such as IMAP/POP, etc. Your IDE HDD, could certainly impact performance as its not going to perform as well as SATA or SCSI/SAS drives would, but depending how much disk I/O you're generating you may be only limited by the amount of space you require as you grow as long as disk activity is kept under control.
Just my 2 cents.
Thanks,
James
