How robust is HPUX mail system

[malay boy]

Hi guy's,
Simple question : how robust is HPUX mail features?.

We have a doubt whether to use a HPUX mail features to send 2000-6000 email (500kb each) in a day.

Can HPUX mail handle this volume ?.

If you could give example on what running at your end it will be beatiful.

regards
mB

[Michael Tully]

Hi,

I can't say for sure (like not everyday) but on ocassions we would send a few thousand messages through sendmail. We don't have problems with it. But I would advise you to keep up with the patching of it. Sendmail is a beast. You will also need to keep an eye on the /var filesystem free space, the /var/adm/syslog/mail.log file, as each message gets logged in and out.
Regards
Michael

[Con O'Kelly]

Hi mB

I assume you will be using sendmail? The limiting factors will be your sendmail config and the system resources. I don't think you should have any problem doing this. This is only around 200 mails an hour, though I suppose it won't be evenly distributed. Disk I/O is liklely to be the main issue and you'll also have a bit of memory overhead. Look into sendmail configuration, there's probably a few parameters that can be tuned to improve performance.

Also keep an eye on the mail log(var/adm/syslog/mail.log) so that it doesn't grow too large and ensure there's a reasonable amount of free space in /var/spool/mqueue directory.


Cheers
Con

[Bill Hassell]

For sheer volume, most Unix systems can send massive amounts of email. The amount is dependent on:

- LAN speed
- Processor quantity
- Whether you send direct to the Internet, send only local messages on your corporate network, or you must go through some email server

Many thousands of email messages per hour are no problem for most modern servers.

[Steven E. Protter]

There are few operating systems more robust and reliable than HP-UX.

Taking into account the factors that Bill Hassel mentioned, I think HP-UX can handle the job.

You'll need a good NIC, your box will need to be properly configured, and you will need to have good Network infrastructure between you and the Internet, but HP-UX can do the job.

You'll also need a really good and redundant DNS setup. All those mails are going to be making little calls to DNS to know where they need to go.

If I had a choice of all the operating systems I've worked with, I'd choose HP-UX for that job. Industrial strength, thats what Pete Randall calls it. He has a salad hat, so he ought to know.

SEP

[malay boy]

Thanks everybody.

The whole story of this are :

we have an NT box sitting in Washington and Unix box in AP.

Currently we doing an ftp from NT to Unix box and well it cause us a lot of problem. (I guess the ftp are not really design to used over the WAN)

So we looking at another approach.

1) Email
2) CIFS

The concern of using CIFS are the distance of the two server.(US <-> APAC).Security,avaiablity and so on are also the concern.
And one more thing,all this is are happening in the company network.

p/s:

Michael,nice hat ...

Bill and Mr wizard,thanks for the response.

Aside to SEP,how are you ??? I guess your salad hat coming pretty soon for you.

regards
mB

[Sandro Schaer_1]

should not be a problem to send these 'few' mails.

but I'd try to solve the ftp problems instead. Could you provide more informations about what kind of errors you encounter when ftp-ing from NT to UNIX ?

We ftp several hundred gigs daily and usually don't have any problems.


have fun
Sandro

[Gregory Fruth]

I would trust the reliability of FTP more
than e-mail or CIFS (!). As far as security
is concerned, at least FTP requires a
password, while e-mail is easy to spoof.
If you're really concerned about security,
perhaps you should try sftp instead of ftp.

HTH

[doug mielke]

CIFS over a long WAN connection will likely be a headache.

Mail, while not secure, is mostly trouble free administrativly.

One of our 4 way K class systems sends over 6,000 mail messeges daily, and the mail processes / daemons never show up in our high resource processes lists.

[Bill Hassell]

Your FTP problems need to be solved. FTP (unlike email, CIFS, NFS, rcp, etc) is network-aware and understands network conditions. It will adjust packet sizes and acknowledgements based on the network's capabilities. FTP is the fastest and most reliable method for file transfers. However, since you are having problems with FTP, make absolutely sure you have the latest patches for HP-UX (not just FTP, but LAN and interface driver patches too) and the same with NT. If FTP still fails, you need to get a network specialist involved to figure out the problem.

Tools like email and CIFS/Samba are very intolerant of network problems. FTP can be scripted which will reduce the manual labor, but if the transfers fail due to WAN problems, I'd look for another WAN vendor.