[PLUG] question on system

Cryptomonkeys.org louisk at cryptomonkeys.org
Sat Sep 22 03:18:08 UTC 2018


Email is perhaps the easiest one.
A single modern server running postfix/dovecot can easily handle the mail for those users. Assuming you will do some SSO using something like ldap/postgres, there are appropriate connectors and config knobs.

If you want everybody to use webmail, then you’ll probably need another 1 or 2 web frontends (depending on how many people will be online at the same time). 

If you want to do testing, postfix comes with a couple of tools called smtp-source and smtp-sink. The former will generate email, the latter will cause it to disappear. You can run them on their own nodes and pass the mail through your postfix server. I suspect that you will find postfix able to handle thousands of messages per second w/o breaking a sweat.

If you really will be doing thousands of messages per second, you will likely need a small farm of boxes to run spam-assassin and your database. Neither will handle the throughput that postfix is capable of. If you do this, make sure you utilize the spamd/spamc functionality, it greatly improves the performance, bringing it almost up to tolerable.


> On Sep 21, 2018, at 6:42 PM, Ben Koenig <techkoenig at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Let's assume I'm an aspiring Google IT guy and I'm preparing for an
> interview as a Google System Adminstrator.
> 
> If I want to build a server that can handle emails from 800 users (500 with
> some headroom) what would I need? Assume that my internet connection is
> capable.
> 
> What kind of CPU do I need to process 800 incoming and outgoing emails in a
> given moment?
> 
> 
> On Thu, Sep 20, 2018 at 3:53 PM Tomas Kuchta <tomas.kuchta.lists at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> 
>> When looking at the requirements 200-500 users - I cannot imagine any
>> practically useful scenario without single sign on solution al least across
>> the web services and centralized group/access control.
>> 
>> With 200-500 users there would be fair amount of user and access management
>> workload. This needs to be distributed to data owners/managers/leaders.
>> 
>> That is beside the already mentioned associated storage, backup, security
>> and disaster recovery management.
>> 
>> There are other companies beside G-company providing these kind of services
>> or enterprise level support. Some examples: Kolab, Nextcloud, Collabora,
>> ...
>> 
>> Regardless of solution chosen - someone has to manage it full time. Given
>> the number of users - it is critical - hence it needs more than one
>> individual to cover for vacation/sickness/disasters/etc.
>> 
>> Just adding to the list of consideration. Do look up the services mentioned
>> above though. They work like G-company, but they are OSS, and the platforms
>> are deployable and manageable by individuals - so the lock-in is not as
>> strong as with proprietary services.
>> 
>> Tomas
>> 
>> On Thu, Sep 20, 2018, 7:13 AM Tyrell Jentink <tyrell at jentink.net> wrote:
>> 
>>> It's been several years since I looked into this... Like others have
>> said,
>>> the administrative overhead is substantial, and I ultimately decided that
>>> it was just easier and more reliable (for my needs) to use Google.
>>> 
>>> That said... The top product I was looking at at the time was Kolab,
>>> http://kolab.org, and it SEEMS to meet many of your requirements...
>>> 
>>> I consider it unlikely that a company of this size would be served by any
>>> single application... If I were setting up Kolab for a client, a good
>>> amount of energy would have to be put into questions like "How do we
>> manage
>>> users?" And "How do we manage storage?" And "How do we manage backups?"
>>> 
>>> Like, maybe you will find that managing lots of users pushes you into
>>> needing an LDAP server, possibly with Single Signon. As you add these
>>> "Supporting" services, your security footprint increases, and you may
>> need
>>> additional firewall and intrusion detection software; Maybe these
>> services
>>> should be on "Bastion Servers," individual servers for each service to
>>> increase both performance and security... Maybe you virtualized some.
>>> 
>>> Maybe those questions lead to non-Linux answers... Maybe you find
>> managing
>>> the workstations of all those users works best with ActiveDirectory
>> rather
>>> than OpenLDAP; Maybe you find that managing the storage requires
>> something
>>> more robust than LVM on XFS or EXT4... And then is Kolab's file sharing
>>> (WebDAV, if I remember correctly) enough for your users? Adding SMB and
>> NFS
>>> can have unintended complications.
>>> 
>>> And all of those questions have to be balanced against the inherent
>> feature
>>> creep that comes from wandering down this road.
>>> 
>>> For many companies, the answer is to simply let Someone Else do it...
>>> Often, that Someone Else is Google.
>>> 
>>> On Wed, Sep 19, 2018, 13:40 logical american <website.reader3 at gmail.com>
>>> wrote:
>>> 
>>>> Hello again:
>>>> 
>>>> Can anyone suggest a linux system server which will successfully do the
>>>> following?
>>>> 
>>>> 1. successfully imitate and replace the Google Groups program
>>>> 2. successfully imitate and replace the Google gmail server
>>>> 3. allow Google drive operations or simulate those operations
>>>> 
>>>> I am seeking to move a large group of users (200-500) from Google
>> Groups
>>>> and gmail over to a stand-alone server and provide some type of Google
>>>> drive functionality also for them, but at a bare minimum a common area
>>>> to download files must exist so users can store their files.
>>>> 
>>>> What would you suggest?
>>>> 
>>>> The users are in the public domain.
>>>> 
>>>> Thanks for the input
>>>> 
>>>> - Randall
>>>> 
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Louis Kowolowski                                louisk at cryptomonkeys.org <mailto:louisk at cryptomonkeys.org>
Cryptomonkeys:                                   http://www.cryptomonkeys.com/ <http://www.cryptomonkeys.com/>

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