Fedora Core 2 AMD 64 Bit: good platform for heavy load mail server?

[Tobias Weisserth]

Hi Christopher,

thanks for sharing your experience!

On Monday, 27. September 2004 16:46, Christopher Hicks wrote:
...
> Sorry for missing the start of this thread.  I'm running an Opteron 146 on
> an Asus board with a gig of ECC/Reg SDRAM and I've been extremely pleased.
> My current uptime is three days, but I've been up to 10 days and I've only
> had the box for three weeks.  It hasn't crashed once.  I've been very
> pleased with the "bang-for-the-buck" of this box.  Opteron+SATA is truly a
> step up in overall system bang-for-the-buck.

Yeah, I figured that having the AMD 64bit platform with a true 64 bit OS I 
would save some money instead of buying expensive SMP hardware from Intel...

And since Fedora is the only ready-to-use distribution from CD, rpm based that 
can be freely downloaded I was curious how it's doing :-)

> If you're expecting to add disk space down the road and want to be able to
> grow your filesystems into it then LVM is as easy software RAID to get
> going and very cool.  If you're happy with static filesystem sizes for the
> forseeable future, then don't worry about it.

OK, then this is certainly on my long term to learn list.

> I haven't tried LVM under x86_64, only on x86, so there may be bug's there
> I'm unaware of.  Within the next few weeks this Opteron 146 box is going
> to become our primary mail server.
>
> Our current mail server is doing SpamAssassin, multiple RBL's, multiple
> virus engine checks on 30k messages a day and its an Athlon 1700 with
> 512M!  One of our motivations for upgrading this box is to get some more
> CPU available for dealing with "email rush hour", but the Athlon has
> handled the 30k without any noticable difficulty.  (Some other things
> running on that box smoke it, but not email.)  So doing 15k messages on
> any AMD64 should be pretty safe.  :)
>
> (Oh yeah, all the boxes are on Fedora Core 2!)

Say, how do you handle the short upgrade cycles of Fedora? Core 3 is nearing 
completion and it is only a matter of time until the Core 2 lifecycle reaches 
an end. Is upgrading to a newer Core release painless and can it be done 
without risking the availability of the services?

regards,
Tobias