6 ms·
Probably not the time to rub people's face in it, but I host my own mail server because of crap like this. Thread from the other day: http://news.ycombinator.
by meaty 14y ago
Probably not the time to rub people's face in it, but I host my own mail server because of crap like this.
Thread from the other day:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4886236 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4886236
- JeremyMorgan 14y agoYup. I'm entirely too reliant on Google products myself. My business not so much but personally I am pretty reliant on them.
- rdl 14y agoI run my own mail server, but it's far from justifiable on a pure uptime basis. I don't have HA configured, so my mail (which serves <10 users on a box in colo) goes down for 2-3 minutes ~4-10 times per year when I reboot. Even worse, I don't really announce downtimes, but just randomly reboot it late at night if I've upgraded something important.
- modoc 14y agoSure, but you have 8-30 minutes of annual downtime, all planned by you:) Not too bad;)
- rdl 14y agoThat's best-case. I have backup-mx, but no real failover for imap or normal smtp (other than reading mailspool directly on the backup mx). I used to do a crazy flood-fill thing with 3 servers smtp forwarding mail and marking it, but doing mail HA correctly is kind of hard (and then keeping mailstore synced from imap in sync, too).
- modoc 14y agoYeah. We use glusterfs to handle the IMAP sync between multiple VMs for HA IMAP. SMTP MX clustering is pretty straightforward in comparison:)
- rdl 14y agoHow well would glusterfs work across the Internet? Doing local HA with some kind of SAN seems fine, but the thing I'm trying to solve is "entire datacenter goes down, make the user have no more pain than making a new imap connection". It seems like something that would really need to be handled inside IMAP (using some crazy backing store for mail, like a database) to be done well, but maybe filesystem level replication with maildir would be enough.
- rdl 14y agoI wish there were some "best practices in systems administration" for different services, ranging from simple (just set up imap/dovecot) through complex (gmail-scale), per service. There's been pretty good focus on how to do http, dns, and some database services, but not as much recently on smtp, imap, etc.
- modoc 14y agoglusterfs would be fine for your situation. There's just some tuning you'll want to do to handle the WAN situation without performance hits.
- lucian1900 14y agoWon't your own server also have downtime?
- meaty 14y agoit does. When I want it to, not when I don't want it to.
- Trufa 14y agoWhat? If keeping uptime of a server was as easy as wishful thinking, we'd see a lot more of REAL 99.9% uptime.
- StavrosK 14y agoThe trick is to want it to be down when you notice that it's down.
- Trufa 14y agoI like it, for my next hosting company: We don't have downtime, just unscheduled maintenance.
- tluyben2 14y agoThat's called Enterprise Hosting and it comes at E10k/server/month excluding bandwidth. I wish I was joking.
- mturmon 14y ago"I meant to do that!"
- icebraining 14y ago"One must require from each one the duty which each one can perform," the king went on. "Accepted authority rests first of all on reason. If you ordered your people to go and throw themselves into the sea, they would rise up in revolution. I have the right to require obedience because my orders are reasonable." "Then my sunset?" the little prince reminded him: for he never forgot a question once he had asked it. "You shall have your sunset. I shall command it. But, according to my science of government, I shall wait until conditions are favorable." "When will that be?" inquired the little prince. "Hum! Hum!" replied the king; and before saying anything else he consulted a bulky almanac. "Hum! Hum! That will be about--about--that will be this evening about twenty minutes to eight. And you will see how well I am obeyed!" http://www.angelfire.com/hi/littleprince/framechapter10.html http://www.angelfire.com/hi/littleprince/framechapter10.html
- apawloski 14y agoMeh, I've had my Gmail for a little over 6 years now. This is the first time I ever remember having this problem. (My Gmail is back up now, by the way.) I'll take this frequency over the effort it takes to maintain my own mail server any day.
- icebraining 14y agoWhat effort? After setup, it just works.
- namdnay 14y agoI doubt any self-hosted service is going to be more reliable than gmail.
- dsl 14y agoGoing on 11 years here with no real issues.
- shrikant 14y agoGmail going down for a few hours each year doesn't count as 'real issues', IMHO..
- kamjam 14y agoOr maybe you have so few users, that when it does go down no one notices?
- dsl 14y agoMonitoring is a beautiful thing.
- kamjam 14y agoSo you're telling me that in 11 years, your server has never been down, even for a reboot, software update or hardware failure? Going on 11 years here with no real issues. Define "no real issues" cos I would define GMail going down for some users in parts of the world for a short period of time as "no real issue".
- dsl 14y agoServers and services are not the same thing. I always had more than one machine, each in different geographical areas. Shell scripts kept mail stores in sync, and stupid DNS tricks were used to direct users to servers that were alive. The overall costs were low too. I'd convince the ISP I was working for to let me colocate a pair of old desktops, and trade one with a friend I'd never met face to face. To clarify my other statement, the biggest "issue" i've had is during a failure of the primary MX messages marked as read would sometimes revert back to being unread for a few minutes.
- ck2 14y agoWhat do you use for webmail?
- jamesbrennan 14y agoI host my own email as well and have been very happy with Roundcube - clean and fast, no bells and whistles.
- state_machine 14y agofwiw, gmail's imap servers seem fine -- I'm still getting emails in sparrow.
- tiziano88 14y agoI use gmail via IMAP on mutt and it still works fine, although the Web UI is giving 502 and other various errors. I guess it's just an issue with the front-end, not the mail server itself.
- jonknee 14y agoSo your web mail interface is always down... I'm still sending and receiving Google Apps mail through IMAP, so we're currently at parity (except I've never had to manage my email server or deal with spam).
- icebraining 14y agoSo your web mail interface is always down... Why? There are Free webmail solution you can install on your own servers.
- jonknee 14y agoAnd they are all horrendous.
- chmars 14y agoI switched from hosting my own server and using local mail providers to Gmail since they had never been able to provide sufficient reliability (uptime, spam filtering, mail delivery). I use, however, Gmail with my own domain name since I want to be able to change to another provider if necessary.
- mun2mun 14y agoI think more appropriate link would be http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4821928 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4821928. Gmail downtime is still negligible WRT maintaining your own mail server. But the problem is the downtime of ecosystem built around it.
- swaits 14y agoThat's not exactly a rational reason. You're really going to struggle to beat Google's uptime. The reason I host my own mail because I want to own and control my data.