Topic: SME File Storage Locations

[mudtoe]

Hi folks:

I was looking over SME as a potential email server, and I'm very impressed.  However, I'm a Linux novice (my only experience was installing Red Hat 7.1 and compiling ShowEQ for use with Everquest), so if my question sounds stupid, please flame lightly    

I've got an old laptop sitting around that would be ideal as an SME server, but my only reservation is the thought of loosing my email data (was thinking of doing IMAP because when traveling I access my outlook PST file on my home system via a file share over a VPN connection, and that's agonizingly slow) stored on the laptop hard drive if it crashes.  I wanted to find out if it was possible to control where SME places its data files.  I have a Dell 725N NAS storage device which runs Win2K server and has RAID 5 capability, and I'd like to store the email data files there.  I browsed through the documentation and didn't see anything that explicitly discussed how to control data file locations.  The 725N can do NFS if SAMBA isn't available to SME.


If anyone has  any insight or experience with this I'd certainly appreciate your comments.

mudtoe

[mmccarn]

I'm sure there are lots of details to work out, but you should be able to create your SME user account, then empty out the user folder created automatically and mount your NAS using either SMB or NFS.

User files are in /home/e-smith/files/users/<username>

[mudtoe]

That's a very interesting suggestion!  I had forgotten that in Unix you can mount a file share at any point in the tree.  

The couple of potential gotchas that I can think of are the timing of the SAMBA mounting (i.e. can I make that happen at bootup before SME starts), and any issues with special characters in filenames, or what would be considered duplicate files in the Windows world (e.g. two files with the same name but different cases, such as filename and fileName which is supported in NFS, but are considered the same name in Windows).   I remember trying to put the ShowEQ source code on a SAMBA file share and it didn't work because it used mutliple files of the same name, but with different cases in the same directory, and the compile kept failing.  Of course, IMHO using the same filename but with different capitalization to denote separate files in the same directory, is dangerous in the first place.

[mmccarn]

I was able to create an ibay, make an empty folder within the ibay, smbmount a network share on the empty folder, then access http://blahblah.blah/ibay/smbshare remotely.

I modified /etc/rc.d/rc.local to re-mount the samba shares at startup, which I did manually but probably should have "templated", using this command:
mount -t smbfs -o username=youruser,password=yourpwd //nas01/data /home/e-smith/files/ibays/youribay/html/data

I did this in May, probably on SME7 RC1, but the smbmount is still working when I look at my system (I haven't used it since setting it up, I just wondered if I could...)

[mudtoe]

That's good!  Looks like I might be able to do what I want, provided I can get it to install.  

The install is hanging on "running /sbin/loader".   Someplace I saw a post from several years ago that referenced this problem and said something about interrupts and such.  I had Redhat 7.1 and 8.0 installed on this laptop, so I know it works, but right now I can't figure out the problem.  I removed the network card, as it's a Xircom cardbus card, and I was afraid it was the problem, as it wasn't on the supported list, but the install still hung in the same place without the card inserted.

mudtoe

[mudtoe]

OK.  I finally got it to install     .  Turns out I needed to hold the shift key down at boot to get the boot prompt and then use the "linux ide=nodma" option in order to get it to work.  

Now, I need to know two things:

1).  Is there a way to keep SME from starting after the boot, so that I have the opportunity to copy the files off of the hard drive and onto the NAS server while SME isn't running and using the files, and then I'll need to put the mount commands in the Linux startup configuration.

2).  Is there some documentation that describes where all the files are?  I figure I might as well put as much of SME as possible on the NAS server, including the configuration settings in addition to the email data, as if mounting the NAS server in the same position in the tree as the existing files works, I may as well have as much stuff as possible on the RAID storage.  That way I can make a disk image backup of the local hard drive, in case it fails, and not worry about having to update the backup every time I add a user or change a configuration setting.

P.S.  Thanks for the assistance so far.

mudtoe

[mudtoe]

I was looking further into the issue of trying to get the files for SME server on my NAS server, which has raid, where they will be safe.  I think I've come up with an even better idea.  The NAS server runs Win2K server, and I found out the VMware Server, which runs on Win2K server or Windows Server 2003, is free!  

I'm installing it now, and am going to try to run SME server under VMware, on the NAS server itself.  That will ensure that all the files are Raid 5 protected.  

Has anyone attempted running SME server on a virtual machine?  I've never used VMWare, and I just got SME server running on a stand alone machine for the first time two days ago, so I'm playing with a whole bunch of technologies that I'm new to, all at the same time.  

[mudtoe]

Looks like everything works under VMware, and it's been stable for a couple of days.  

Now that everything is RAIDed on the NAS server, I feel OK in going ahead and migrating all my stuff from my old PST files to IMAP.  I still need to run some performance tests on how things work from a remote VPN connection when I connect outlook to SME server using IMAP, and there are hundreds of messages in there, some with large attachments, but so far things look really good.  This is a pretty neat product.  If this all works out over the next couple of weeks I'll be making a donation.


mudtoe