[Samba] A plea for some feedback

[Adam Williams]

> Hello everyone.
> This email makes reference to mail servers and email, but please read the 
> email. You will see that I have some questions about samba. :)
> I need some feedback and thoughts on a particular setup that "Management" 
> is trying to go with.
> Some info first:
> Running Samba 2.2.8a as a PDC with OpenLDAP on the backend.
> Running a mail server running Postfix, Courier-IMAP, Mailman, and other 
> nice toys.
> Basically, all of our clients will be using a Netscape or Mozilla IMAP client.
> What they want to do is, basically, have all the users copy the email that 
> is on the Mail/IMAP server to a second location, OTHER than their local 
> computer. Thus, they want a second server setup that will allow users to 
> store their email on that server as well. They also want it setup so they 
> can view both sets of emails at the same time through the email client.
> With me so far?

I guess, buy ***WHY***?  What the bloody hell does this accomplish? 
You've got mail in an IMAP server (where it @&*^$*@ belongs) *AND*
sitting out on a file system as a "flat" file?  Your going to look at
the same mail message from both repositories at the same time?  As an
excerise in pointless effort?

> Ok...management wants to see if we can store the emails (that is, all the 
> emails) for each user onto the mapped drive on the PDC.

Why?  They must have some kind of reasoning.

> To me, thats a bad idea. I think that this is a recipe for disaster. If we 
> go this route, I want to split it up and not put everything on one server.
> What I was hoping was to get some feedback on why this would be a bad idea. 
> I'm not trying to attack Samba at all, but I want to convince management 
> that their idea is a bad one.

This really doesn't have anything to do with Samba.  You create a share,
the user copies the messages into a "local" (as far as the client is
concerened) mail folder.  If your talking Win32 clients, sure you can do
that.

Maybe your actually looking for some kind of redundancy?  (Again, you
never say why someone is chasing this half baked plan).  There are
several well documented ways to make a highly available IMAP service; 
head on over to the Cyrus documentation.

Auditing?  You want to store a copy of every message?  Every MTA can do
that,  and you can just post a copy to a specified mailbox.  The
paranoid suites can be given access to that mailbox as just another IMAP
folder (in Cyrus anyway).  Want it stored on a seperate box?  Ok, 
install Cyrus on that box too and enable MURDER.

But keep mail in the mail server.  It doesn't belong anywhere else.

> I appreciate everyones suggestions and feedback.

Your welcome.