Mail Store location change possible?

[BooYah]

Okay, I think I need more of a "theory of how it works" lesson here instead of a "how to do it" lesson really... (unless someone wants to write a wiki on it!).

Here's my Scalix server setup:
AMD Athlon 64X2 4800+
Centos 4.4 x64
4GB RAM
Scalix Community Edition with MailWasher and FirstAlert!
1)120 GB Hard disk partitioned with /
2)250 GB Hard disks in RAID 0 partitioned with /opt


The system is working absolutely flawlessly and MailWasher with FirstAlert! is super! Now, here's my dilemma. I have noticed that my mail store is on the 120GB "/" partition. Obviously I partitioned the larger RAID'ed "/opt" for the mail store and I would like it to be there. I've developed a theory that Scalix is simply a front-end and Sendmail actually "controls" the mail store. Is this true? In this case moving the mail store is a Sendmail issue and not a Scalix issue. I would just like to be set straight on how this works so I can research the mail store move in the right channels. I am thinking I need to do some Sendmail research here right?

Thanks in advance for any insight!

B~

[mikevl]

Hi

Yes the message store can be moved.

The message store is a UNIX binary file system held under /var/opt/scalix/~
You will find many posts under file system on the forum.

In short you can move /var/opt/scalix to a new disk
You HAVE to presevrve all permissions on files
You will need to create a symlink to the new file location

[BooYah]

Thank you!!!

I understand perfectly! That's just the info that i needed.



B~

[BooYah]

Thanks for the advice... Here's what I did:

# /etc/init.d/scalix stop
# /etc/init.d/scalix-tomcat stop

# mv /var/opt/scalix /opt/mailstore
# ln -s /opt/mailstore/scalix /var/opt/scalix

# /etc/init.d/scalix start
# /etc/init.d/scalix-tomcat start

All's well now! ran "df -h" before and after and the large store was indeed moved and space is/won't be an issue for a long time! I find the raid to be a little speedier too!

Thanks again!

B~

[Kris]

Make sure you have a proper backup scheme, because you will get in big trouble when on of your disks in your raid 0 stops working!

If you have the possibility, changing the raid0 to a raid 10 would be a good thing to do!

[adhodgson]

Hi,

Where you went wrong was to partition /opt as the larger partition. /opt is where Scalix puts its binaries, so what I would have done is to include /opt on the first disk set, then create a separate partition for /var/opt (where Scalix puts its files).

If this is a test install restart from scratch, otherwise you can move the mountpoint for /opt and move the files/reinstall, then create a new partition for /var/opt mountpoint (editing /etc/fstab), and move the files to the new disk.

You may want to do this using temporary mounts so you can move the data from the one mountpoint to the other.

Andrew.

[BooYah]

I do appreciate the suggestions immensely! I realized during the install of scalix that I was not going to be given the choice of where to put the mail store. I'm okay with running like this for a while whilst I build another server (with RAID 5 and sufficient space) and restore server 1's mail to it after I get it built correctly. I'm used to putting my binaries and storage on /opt and I though I could choose that but was unable. I'm learning!

I've got some cron jobs that backup the mail store and move the tarball off to another file server which is backed up to tape. I've lost RAID 0 drives before but I really enjoy the read speed of RAID 0 and fast drives.

This seems to be working for now until I clean it all up with the REAL server.

Thanks again for the advice!

B~