The mailing list for listmasters using Sympa

[Christian Dahlhausen <address@concealed>]

Jeff, 
we are in the same boat. We also have a single Sympa server at UVa with about 16,000 mailing lists and are currently looking into an upgrade to Sympa 6 (we are running 5) due to performance issues with the web interface mainly. We would be interested in your findings regarding redundancy. We are storing list archives on a netapp share right now and don't have any problems. Based on earlier messages to this list, I think moving the list configurations to a NFS share and have two Sympa servers access it, could be a bottleneck. At least with current software architecture, doing a 'list of lists' or 'new lists' function takes a long time by itself. I think the v6 architecture looks like it could handle multiple postfix/bulk instances. We are also looking into a non-standard Sympa patch that stores a "list of lists" in the sympa database (which would help if you have a load balanced environment), but haven't gone down that road yet. 

For now our failover strategy (after we have done the upgrade) is to have a cold standby server, that uses archives shared on a netapp share and replicates its Sympa mysql database frequently. 
Christian

On Wed, Aug 18, 2010 at 12:26 PM, Jeff Abbott <address@concealed> wrote:

Folks,

We're looking to improve the availability of our Sympa system here at Duke, to hopefully prevent the risk of having a single point of failure as we do now, with one machine on one network in one data center running the service.  It looks like running a hot/cold failover system would be simple enough, with a load balancer routing mail appropriately and each system being aware of all the lists.  I don't know how well archives would work with such a setup, though, unless we were doing some sort of shared storage (e.g. NFS), which introduces its own set of problems.

I'm wondering if anyone has solved this problem, or has any pointers for me that might help.  I'm sure there are issues that haven't yet occurred to me.

Thanks,
Jeff

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Christian Dahlhausen, Network Systems Engineer
University of Virginia - ITC Network Systems 
PO Box 400324, 2015 Ivy Road, Charlottesville, VA 22904