Re: [ProgSoc] Listserver on linux ?

[Matt <matt@nospam.telesales.zip.com.au>]

Justin Vo wrote this...

> I'm currently looking for a list server software to install on
> RedHat linux. This software should able to handle up to 1000
> mailout.

> Does anyone know such software ? I heard Listprocessor or Majordomo
> will do the job but not sure if it will run on linux.

majordomo will in fact work on redhat (i would suggest using sendmail
if you are going to use majordomo).

> If you do what's hardware requirement and what's it pro and cons ?
> What about on NT ? and free too ?

NT? i havent heard of any software that does this sort of thing under
NT (as in allows people to subscribe to a list via email, handles
moderated lists etc), but listproc might work under NT. free under NT
is a rare thing. *shrug*

my suggestion, go with majordomo and sendmail on a linux (or other
unix box). a 486 could probably handle a 1000 person list, it wouldnt
be blindingly quick, but this is email so time criticality is probably
not important. you will probably want to tweak the sendmail set up to
handle network failures (ie failed delivers) because this can cripple
the machine if not done correctly (set it up to retry sending every 15
mins, ie a queue run every 15 minutes, but only try to deliver mail
that has been sitting idle for at least 30 or 45 minutes).

so, go buy a pentium 200 MMX (the things they almost dont sell
anymore) with a 4G HD and 32M of memory and that should do you fine
(provided you dont have anyone using the machine as a login box or
something, in which case get 64M).

oh, and make sure that you network bandwidth is enough to handle the
load. calculate the number of bytes you have coming into the list per
second, average of course, and mulitply it by one plus the number of
people on the list and tack an extra 50% on top for safety. that
should be your absolute minimum bandwidth. make sure you dont mix up
bytes per second and bits per second :)

this comes from personal experience of having set up a number of large
email sites, ie 2000+ users and mailing lists etc.

	Matt
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