Cyrus Murder Experiences

rfrederick

At the uni I work at we're looking at doing some horizontal expansion of our student email system. We've been able to run everything (sendmail, MIMEDefang, ClamAV, SpamAssassin, Cyrus) on one machine relatively smoothly up until this past academic year when we experienced a large increase in enrollment. We've already expanded the spam filtering portion of our infrastructure through setting up a separate box running DSPAM, but we're also needing to expand out our MDA. Since we're running Cyrus as our MDA we're looking at setting up a cluster of machines (physical and/or virtual) running Cyrus in a murder configuration. Has anyone deployed a Cyrus Murder setup? If so how did it go? Were there any major snags along the way aside from what's described in Carnegie-Mellon's documentation?

brianwalshcork

rfrederick wrote: »

Has anyone deployed a Cyrus Murder setup?

What would be so terrible about using proven commerical software? It might cost you a bit upfront, put the TCO won't include the cost of posting messages on forums at the other side of the world, but it works, and if nothing else, it will have a sensible name!

Your students are relying on you to provide an email service that works, leave the experimenting for the research depts.

rfrederick

I'm actually the research guy more or less. The guy in the office next to mine is the one who admins the student email system and tasked me with seeing about setting up a test Cyrus Murder environment and helping with throwing out a production environment.

On commercial software, the other Unix admin has toyed with the idea of outsourcing everything to GMail, since we're not provided with much physical infrastructure. But of course we'd like to keep our data on campus as much as possible and would likely go to GMail as a last resort, ie Arizona State IIRC.

On the "other side of the world" point, this is "T3h Int3rw3bz!!!11" What difference does it make in TCO of an email system if I post this onto a vBulletin install on a box in my condo or a vBulletin install six timezones away?

[EDIT time!]
For those unfamiliar, Cyrus is a blanket name for various projects run by Carnegie-Mellon University. They include an IMAP(S)/POP3(S)/POPK/NNTP server, SASL libraries, and an FTP server. The "Murder" designation for a horizontally-distributed Cyrus MDA comes from the terminology for a group of crows. According to the documentation the term "Murder" was selected because the Cyrus group thought it the coolest name for a group of entities. :rolleyes:

brianwalshcork

rfrederick wrote: »

On the "other side of the world" point, this is "T3h Int3rw3bz!!!11" What difference does it make in TCO of an email system if I post this onto a vBulletin install on a box in my condo or a vBulletin install six timezones away?

I could say that I didn't mean that in a geographical sense, but I did, I won't as it would be a factitious defense :-)
You are of course correct, but your asking a pretty specialised question on a general board. The TCO part was my reaction to the cost of your time for searching for answers in places that may not be the most appropriate.

I don't really have anything to contribute, apart from my objection to debugging software in live environments when the users aren't aware that they are guinea pigs, but since you are the research guy that isn't what's happening either, so I'm just jumping to conclusions.

I'll bow out now... well, not quite... there's nothing wrong with out sourcing your email, the fact is that whoever you outsource your mail will probably do a better job than you can do, simply because that's what they do, and you (and the admin) probably wear 10 different hats. If your mail service is a descerte part of the services that you provide and can easily be outsourced then it would be an opprotunity missed not to take advantage of that.

For some reason, outsourcing to gmail doesnt sit confortably with me though....

rfrederick

Admittedly I had the fear(?) of posting such a such a specialised question on such a public board, but since this is the "Servers & Systems" section it seems the best place to post to see if anyone would bite.

Honestly this is the first place that I've thrown these questions out. I thought to throw these questions out here due to it being one of the largest general-purpose forum installs I know of (not to mention that boards.us is being merged into boards.ie), and given how much I attempt to pay attention to the goings-on on the Island.

I more than understand the uncomfortable feeling of outsourcing to GMail, I'm right there with you. At the uni I was a student at (Kansas State University) I wrote a published op-ed dissecting my distaste for outsourcing their email from a Sendmail (MTA) -> Courier (MDA) install to an outsourced infrastructure, primarily focusing on the arguments for outsourcing (a single outage due to SAN problems IIRC) and data privacy. The uni outsourced their email to Zimbra soon after I left, which has been sold to various companies since (they were originally owned by Yahoo!) resulting in large chunks of undefined downtime due to infrastructure migration and a significant increase in spam messages in inboxes due to poor spam filtering.

Static M.e.

Sorry, I dont know anything about Cyrus but..

This could be a bit out of the left field here, but have you looked at the Microsoft Live @ Edu products?

We dont qualify here but I think the idea behind it is nice, it would save a lot of hassle over the long term I think. Worth having a look at anyway.

http://www.microsoft.com/liveatedu/free-email-accounts.aspx?locale=en-US&country=US

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Live@edu

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2009/jun09/06-22LiveEduv3PR.mspx?rss_fdn=Press+Releases

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ukeducationpartnernews/archive/2010/05/05/universities-opt-for-microsoft-s-cloud-email-service-over-google-mail.aspx

http://www.sf.edu/mail/