Rodrigo Barbosa wrote:
I'm planning the installation of the school's Mail Server. This is the first time I get in administration. I've been reading about postfix, cyrus and the first page in the guide of HughesJR.com[2] about installing postfix-cyrus, but due my low hardware resources, I ask for suggestions to see If what I need can be done (and|or) stable.
Hardware: Pentium III 1.4Ghz 256 RAM 40 GB HD-IDE
Soft: CentOS 4.2 Postfix Cyrus-IMAPd MailScanner Spanassassin
First off, dump either antivirus or antispam on that machine. You don't have enough memory to keep both happy.
How about using MailScanner ? and wrap that around clamav + spamassassin, you can run it with 2 - 4 threads on a machine with 256megs of ram, and since spamassassin runs via its perl interface locally ( and not via spamd ), it uses up no resources while its not running.
MailScanner might slow your inbound mail queue processing by a few seconds, but would allow you to better manage the resources you have on the machine ( and also implement any policy based email rules you might want to have )
A P3 1.4GHz is more than up to the task, so you will have no problem there.
You might also want to change Cyrus-imapd to something simpler, like wu-imapd, since it should take less resources from the machine. Then again, I have very little experience with cyrus, since I either use wu or courrier.
With 2000 users and 80+ concurrent users, you will find Cyrus performs faster with lower system resources than Wu-imap or Dovecot!
Also, on a machine with that setup, I'd have a Gig of Swap. And that 40GB hdd, i wonder how fast that runs :) might end up being the bottle neck in the equation.
- K