Application servers + SMTP server

[Crusty]

I am curious as to how everyone else sets up their application servers with regards to mail configuration. We're about to roll out some production mongrel clusters and I'm trying to decide how to setup the mail.

I was thinking of using a smarthost configuration with one central Postfix SMTP server w/ TLS authentication and then using sendmail on each application server node to relay through the smarthost.

The emails are mostly used for monitoring and alerts, but in the future the applications will most likely be sending emails but not at a high volume, at most 100 emails / hour.

The mongrel clusters are going to sit behind a reverse proxy so I'm trying to minimize the exposure to the outside world as much as possible.

Any suggestions or tips?

 

[kamper]

Why put sendmail on each application server? Are the app servers themselves not capable of connecting to the postfix server?

Also, if you postfix server is behind your firewall, why bother with tls?

 

[Crusty]

Each application server has software that's installed on them that requires a local MTA. At some point in the future that will be changed, but for now it's needed.

I thought TLS would be a good idea since there will most likely be multiple sites for the clusters in the future and instead of having 1 smtp server for each site, just have one global one w/ redundancy of course, but after more thoughts including an smtp server at each location would be better, offers more redundancy. Won't be difficult to do since most of this will be virtualized anyways 🙂.

 

[heymrdj]

I'm about to do this same thing for an experimental Apache cluster on my end. It needs to be able to handle a few thousand emails per day depending. So going one central Postfix, sendmail on all the app servers. I'm using TLS however because the server is handling both internal cluster needs, and external client needs.