sendmail for 1500 users on rx1600

[Gabriel Jiménez Salazar]

Hi everybody
I have a rx1600 with HP-UX 11.23 gigabit interface I am going to use my server for mail server of 1500 users I want to know what kernel parameters or kernel tuning is necesary for make work really good my email server with sendmail
Thanks a lot for your help

[harry d brown jr]

step 1: purchase http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0321115708?v=glance
step 2: read book
step 3: install the latest version of bind (9.2.x) and configure it
step 4: install the latest version of sendmail
step 5: Make sure your machine is up-to-date with patches
step 6: determine the number of users you would have on at any one time retreiving / sending mail.
step 7: apply ideas from book

live free or die
harry d brown jr

[Florian Heigl (new acc)]

also look at the ndd man pages, You might want to reduce tcp timeouts with that many accesses.

[Jeff Schussele]

LOL Harry!
All I can say is that when I was lead for the OpenMail system for Cat I could hold up 5000+ users on a single H-class system.
So my opinion would be that a system of that speed shouldn't have a problem with that user load - IF it's configured correctly. Read that as not having a ham-strung I/O system.
OpenMail is I/O intensive - not CPU. So have a swift SAN system - SCSI won't cut it.

My $0.02,
Jeff

[rick jones]

Minor nit - IIRC the latest version of BIND is 9.3.

As for TCP/kernel parms to tweak, I doubt there will be many TCP parms to change - at least not performance-wise. Might change tcp_conn_request_max to 1024, but if netstat -p tcp shows no connections dropped due to full queue it won't matter.

ftp://ftp.cup.hp.com/dist/networking/briefs/annotated_netstat.txt

Depending on how many are connected at once you may want to alter maxfiles/maxfiles_lim, nfile, perhaps nproc or the ones controlling maximum threads depending on how the software is written.

[Jeff Schussele]

Responding to earler posts I would just say that unless we're talking a *very* small orginization here I would never suggest that the OM & sendmail server be one & the same.
That's just not good practice!
Simply because a DOS attack upon the SMTP inbound server could take out the internal e-mail server as well.

My 2 cents,
Jeff