[BBLISA] OSS campus mail

[Elliot Kendall]

On 2004-10-24 23:58:54 -0400, Rick Martin wrote:
> Is anyone using open source software to support campus email?
> Any offer to share info on hardware/software configurations
> would be greatly appreciated.

At Brandeis University, we run a combined Sendmail/Postfix
configuration for about 7,000 students, staff and faculty. At the
moment we have one primary MX and two secondary MXs running
Sendmail, Clam AV and SpamAssassin. Each is a dual P4 Xeon with 2 gig
of RAM. The primary does nothing but process mail and load hovers
around 2, while the secondaries also run Horde IMP webmail with load
around 0.75.

We actually store the mail and serve it to the users on three
boxes running Postfix. One machine serves undergrads, one grad
students, and one faculty and staff. In order to speed up webmail
service, these machines have loads of RAM with the idea being that
the most-used mailboxes will remain cached. The undergrad server has
8 gigs, staff/faculty 12 gigs, and graduate 7 gigs. Looking at
/proc/cpuinfo, I can't remember whether they really have 4 and 8
CPUs, or if they're just hyperthreaded. These are pretty much always
above 4 load. We keep the mail itself on Linux software RAID-1
volumes.

We maintain a wiki page with information about the software config
here: http://web.brandeis.edu/pages/view/Info/EmailArchitecture
As far as Outlook-esque features go, we also run Oracle Calendar
AKA Steltor, AKA CorporateTime. Our whole setup has been stable and
people seem pretty happy with it.

Elliot Kendall
ITS Systems Administrator
Brandeis University