Author: Erin
Date: 02-04-05 13:36
At my last job, I setup 5 FreeBSD servers. 2 DNS, 2 SMTP gateways and a stats box.
The 2 DNS servers were over built, but also served as NFS hosts for the backups.
The stats box ran mrtg and graphed every switch and router on the network. There are a LOT of switches and routers, easily several hundred.
The SMTP gateways were my babies. They were the reason I loved my job.
Using Activestates' (now Sophos') PureMessage on a 2.4G Xeon, 4G RAM, 4x72G U160 on RAID 5 (HP 5302 SCSI to SCSI RAID). When I first built the servers we were processing about 140,000 emails a month. Fast forward two years and we are handling about 1.4 Million email a month.
I had some nice MRTG graphs with a custom version of phpsysinfo. I must say, that after getting the RAID controller worked out, that those machines were rock solid. They would have 2 years of total uptime, if it were not for the datacenter move. :-)
By the way, on a server with a high rate of transactions to a RAID set, use battery-backed write-through cache on the controller. At peak we would hit 150,000 transaction/second. This was later fixed in Puremessage, but none the less was the bane of my existence for a long while.
-Erin
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