RE: [TCLUG:16017] Dedicated Linux e-mail servers: good experiences, anyone?

["Eric Hillman" <ehillman@cccu.com>]

>
> For performance's sake, I need to move my company's e-mail services to a
> dedicated box.  Standard POP3/SMTP for about 50 simultaneous users.  I've
> been looking at Linux solutions, and the ZD test I found rated the Netwinder
> above the Cobalt Qube and IBM InterJet II as far as e-mail goes.
>
> Good word of mouth means more than a review, though.  Any of you who are
> running mail servers care to share good experiences?  Lord knows there's
> enough bad experiences out there. ;)
>


  We have a little over 100 users here, most of whom leave Outlook running all
the time -- up until about a year ago, we were servicing all of them on a 486
DX100 running Slackware Linux.   In fact, this was our very first Linux PC, and
had been running as our intranet server and gateway to the internet until we
split those functions off to seperate boxes.  We finally junked it because the
BIOS wasn't Y2K compliant.

  At present, we're using Caldera on a PII box that you could probably build for
under $300, easy.    We run sendmail, POP3 and IMAP, plus Apache for remote
management-type stuff.  The only problem we've ever had was that Caldera doesn't
have automatic log rotation configured out of the box -- took me a couple weeks
to figure out why imap was slowing to a crawl.  However, on a well-configured
box that's doing nothing but mail, I believe you could get away with pretty much
anything Pentium-class or better.  The main thing I'd suggest is to make sure
you've got a minimum of 64MB memory, and make sure you've got a nice roomy /var
partition to hold the mailspools and logs.


--
Eric Hillman
UNIX Sysadmin/Webmaster
City & County Credit Union
ehillman@cccu.com