We won’t be going into much details on how exactly @Mail was installed as their own website provides very clear instructions about the installation in multiserver mode. You should make sure the NFS mount and all the required services  For more details on these you can visit this knowlegde base article from the @Mail site itself. We will be looking into the Round Robin DNS setup which would need to be done for this setup.

You can run Pop3/IMAP , SMTP and Webmail services from different servers when you run @Mail in multiserver mode.You would need edit the DNS records for your domain to be able to utilize the cluster setup on your domain. We normally use ISC Bind as the nameserver on our setups and we used the same for this setup. We will consider the hypothetical domain used for the setup as yourdomain.com throughout this article.

Our cluster had three nodes namely: node1.yourdomain.com (123.123.123.126), node2.yourdomain.com (123.123.123.127) and node3.yourdomain.com (123.123.123.128) . We installed @Mail on all of them as per the official multiserver installation instuctions and it shared the same MySQL db and used the central NFS storage area as well. The setup requires the MX records for the domain to be pointed to all the 3 nodes. The MX priority for each of these mail servers should be the same so that the mails are distributed properly to these nodes.

The DNS entries for the nodes would be as below in the zone file:

node1         IN      A       123.123.123.126
node2         IN      A       123.123.123.127
node3         IN      A       123.123.123.128

The MX record for the domain needs to point to each of the nodes as below. The priority would remain the same. It is set to 0 in this case.

yourdomain.com.           IN      MX      0       node1
yourdomain.com.           IN      MX      0       node2
yourdomain.com.           IN      MX      0       node3

The above setup will set the incoming mails to be handled by any of the 3 nodes.

The remaining services would need to be load balanced to the different nodes in the same manner. This includes the Webmail and POP3/IMAP services. The setup in the DNS zone file would be as below. Using the round robin setup, if a node goes down in the cluster the request is automatically forwarded to the next node.

mail  IN      A       123.123.123.126
mail  IN      A       123.123.123.127
mail  IN      A       123.123.123.128

You would need the reload the DNS zone after making these changes or restart the service. You would need to verify the changes you made as below:

# dig yourdomain.com mx
 
;; QUESTION SECTION:
;yourdomain.com.                    IN      MX
 
;; ANSWER SECTION:
yourdomain.com.             86400   IN      MX      0 node3.yourdomain.com.
yourdomain.com.             86400   IN      MX      0 node1.yourdomain.com.
yourdomain.com.             86400   IN      MX      0 node2.yourdomain.com.

You can find below that mail.yourdomain.com resolves to 3 Ips as below.

# nslookup mail.yourdomain.com
Server:         127.0.0.1
Address:        127.0.0.1#53
 
Name:   mail.yourdomain.com
Address: 123.123.123.126
Name:   mail.yourdomain.com
Address: 123.123.123.127
Name:   mail.yourdomain.com
Address: 123.123.123.128

Using this method you can setup a load balanced mail cluster using @Mail. If you have additions to make, they are always welcome

Related posts:

1. Round Robin DNS Setup :: A Howto Round Robin DNS is a technique involving changes to the...
2. Corporate Clustered Mail Server Setup Organizations with huge staff or even medium sized organizations with...

1. If you need a site’s http traffic to be distributed to multiple servers, you need to set the A records in the DNS zone for the domain as below :

domain.com. 300 IN A 123.123.123.123
domain.com. 300 IN A 123.123.124.124
domain.com. 300 IN A 111.112.113.114

2. If you need a site’s mail traffic to be distributed to multiple servers, you should point the domain’s MX record to mail.domain.com and then you need to set the A records in the DNS zone for the mail record as below :


domain.com 3600 IN MX 0 mail.domain.com.
domain.com. 300 IN A 123.123.123.123
domain.com. 300 IN A 123.123.124.124
domain.com. 300 IN A 111.112.113.114

In the above examples you will see that the TTL for the A record has been set to 300 seconds. This is lower than normal and so the traffic will be rotated in Round Robin Mode.

Related posts:

1. Clustered Mail Server Setup with @mail We recently configured a clustered mail server setup and webmail...

We have to check for some prerequisites here before doing this installation. I will list them out as below :

• MySQL Server Installation
• Openssl Installed
• Pcre and Pcre-devel packages installed

These are just basic requirements and if you need some other special modules installed these may change as well. I am assuming the OS for the server would be CentOS 5.x in this how to but I do believe this how to should work for Fedora, CentOS or RHEL as well. You can use “yum” to install the above requirments or use “up2date” on RHEL . Lets assume that the prerequisites are already satisfied and we will proceed with the actual installation. We will make a temporary directory for the installation so that we can remove this directory once the installation is successful.

mkdir /usr/src/lighttpd_install

We will download the latest lighttpd source file from their site and uncompress it.

cd /usr/src/lighttpd_install
wget http://www.lighttpd.net/download/lighttpd-1.4.19.tar.gz
tar xzf lighttpd-1.4.19.tar.gz
cd lighttpd-1.4.19
./configure --prefix=/usr
make
make install

Once Lighttpd is installed we need to copy the init.d script for Lighttpd and also the spawn-php.sh script to /etc/init.d/ . This spawn-php.sh will be used to spawn php-fcgi processes later after we build PHP.

cp -av doc/rc.lighttpd.redhat /etc/init.d/lighttpd
cp -av doc/spawn-php.sh /etc/init.d/spawn-php.sh

Now we need to build fastcgi on the server.

wget http://www.fastcgi.com/dist/fcgi-2.4.0.tar.gz
tar xvf fcgi-2.4.0.tar.gz
cd fcgi-2.4.0
./configure --prefix=/usr
make
make install

Php needs to be built after this step. You can either use php4 or php5 as per your requirement. You need to download the php source from the PHP site (http://www.php.net) into the /usr/src/lighttpd_install before proceeding to the next step. We will be using PHP5 in this case and the php version used for the tutorial is php 5.2.6 . Once you have downloaded the source the steps would be as below: If you have an existing and working php installation on the server, you can use the same configure options for building php again. The following code snippet should get you the existing config line without the options we need for the build

php -i | grep config | sed s/"'"/""/g | sed s/"<.*> "/""/g |\
sed s/"<\/.*>"/""/g | sed s/".* =>  "/""/g | sed s/"'"/""/g |\
sed s/"--with-apxs=.*apxs "/""/g | sed s/".\/configure "/""/g |\
sed s/"--prefix=\/usr\/local "/""/g | sed s/"--with-apxs2=.*apxs "/""/g |\
grep -v ^tidy

Use this output from the above command along with the options below as your configure line to build php as fastcgi

--prefix=/usr/local/php5-fcgi --enable-force-cgi-redirect\
--enable-fastcgi --enable-discard-path

If you do not have an existing php installation, just build php with whatever options you need and add the –enable-fastcgi options as above. The procedure would be as below:

cd /usr/src/lighttpd_install
tar zxf php-5.2.6.tar.gz
./configure ---(add options you need to add or use\
 the config line generated from above)\--prefix=/usr/local/php5-fcgi\
--enable-force-cgi-redirect --enable-fastcgi --enable-discard-path
make
make install

If the installation is successfull you should should see php built with cgi-fcgi mode as below. Please node the php binary name could also be php-cgi.

[root@server ~]# /usr/local/php5-fcgi/bin/php -v
PHP 5.2.6 (cgi-fcgi) (built: May  8 2008 02:38:11)
Copyright (c) 1997-2008 The PHP Group
Zend Engine v2.2.0, Copyright (c) 1998-2008 Zend Technologies
    with eAccelerator v0.9.5.2, Copyright (c) 2004-2006 eAccelerator, by eAccelerator
    with the ionCube PHP Loader v3.1.32, Copyright (c) 2002-2007, by ionCube Ltd., and
    with Zend Extension Manager v1.2.2, Copyright (c) 2003-2007, by Zend Technologies
    with Zend Optimizer v3.3.3, Copyright (c) 1998-2007, by Zend Technologies

After successfully building Lighttpd and PHP in Fastcgi mode, its times to now configure them to work together. In this tutorial we are considering a single site environment and so we will set the configuration files accordingly. We will be adding some more how to’s soon which will show the configurations that need to be done for multi site environments or even complex setups like load balancing using Apache and Lighttpd together.

mkdir /etc/lighttpd
cd /usr/src/lighttpd_install/lighttpd-1.4.19
cp -v doc/lighttpd.conf /etc/lighttpd/
vi /etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf

We need to make sure the following modules are now enabled in the lighttpd.conf . They just need to be uncommented.

• mod_rewrite
• mod_redirect
• mod_alias
• mod_access
• mod_cml
• mod_auth
• mod_status
• mod_setenv
• mod_fastcgi
• mod_simple_vhost
• mod_cgi
• mod_ssi
• mod_accesslog

Your server modules section of lighttpd.conf should look as below after the change :

server.modules              = (
                               "mod_rewrite",
                               "mod_redirect",
                               "mod_alias",
                               "mod_access",
                               "mod_cml",
                               "mod_auth",
                               "mod_status",
                               "mod_setenv",
                               "mod_fastcgi",
                               "mod_simple_vhost",
                               "mod_cgi",
                               "mod_ssi",
                               "mod_accesslog" )

The other options that need to be changed are:

server.document-root        = "/home/username/public_html"

The document root can even be in /var/www/html or just anywhere you want . We choose /home/username/public_html for easier ftp access to the location for updates.

server.errorlog             = "/home/username/logs/error.log"

Changing this setting is optional. If you want the user to have access to the error log then change the above option. Otherwise you can leave the setting as it is. Just make sure you have created the file folder /var/log/lighttpd and chowned it to the username you run lighttpd and php as.

accesslog.filename          = "/home/username/logs/access.log"

Again this setting is also optional. If you want the user to have access to the access log then change the above option.

server.port                = 80

The default port is 80. If you want to test or run your lighttpd installation on a non-standard port, you need to change this.

server.bind                = "xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx"

This is the Ip address lighttpd listens on. By default it listens on all IPs. If you want it binded to just one Ip on the server you need specify this option.

server.username            = "username"
server.groupname           = "username"

The username and group which lighttpd will run as. We are going to have the server running in suexec mode when we specify these options. Files created by the webserver will be owned by the username itself.

fastcgi.server = ( ".php" =>
  (( "host" => "127.0.0.1",
     "port" => 1026,
     "bin-path" => "/usr/local/php5-fcgi/bin/php"
  ))
 
)

In the above section we are specifying how php files will be handled. The bin-path will change as well as the port based on the spawn-php.sh script which we will be configuring next. After all these changes, the lighttpd.conf is all setup for use once you save the file. We will now configure the spawn-php.sh script which we have previously copied to /etc/init.d/

cd /etc/init.d/
vi spawn-php.sh

The following options need to be edited in this script:

SPAWNFCGI="/usr/bin/spawn-fcgi"

The path to spawn-fcgi will be as above as we have configured it with /usr prefix before.

FCGIPROGRAM="/usr/local/php5-fcgi/bin/php"

This path would be the absolute path to the php-fcgi binary. Please note it can be be /usr/local/php5-fcgi/bin/php-cgi as well.

FCGIPORT="1026"
FCGI_WEB_SERVER_ADDRS="127.0.0.1"

These can be left alone as they are unless you want a different Ip or Port specifically.

USERID=username
GROUPID=username

The userid and groupid for the script would be same as the one you have used in the lighttpd.conf before. Save the script and then chmod it to 755 and run it. You should see something like below as the output:

spawn-fcgi.c.197: child spawned successfully: PID: 10985

Now it is time to start lighttpd . Make sure the lighttpd logs folders are created and the user ownerships are set correctly. Once that is done, you can start lighttpd using the command as below:

[root@server ~]#/etc/init.d/lighttpd start
Starting lighttpd: [  OK  ]

Check the status to make sure it is running otherwise check the error log as set in the config file.

[root@server ~]# /etc/init.d/lighttpd status
lighttpd (pid 11210) is running...

This completes the installation steps. To test php you can upload a phpinfo file in the document root folder. A sample phpinfo.php would have the code like :

If your installation is running correctly, you should see the server API as CGI/FastCGI as it shows in the image below.
If you see the above, you have completed a successful installation of lighttpd and php running as a fastcgi. We hope you liked this how to and it is useful for setting up high performance lighttpd+php fastcgi setups for your site.

No related posts.