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In article <1993Jan07.035947.15311@i88.isc.com>, mikebo@i88.isc.com (Michael Borowiec) writes:
|> If anyone has gone the MS-MAIL with SMTP gateway route, I'd be 
|> interested in your experiences so far. Especially...
|> 
|> 1) How hard it is to get/keep the gateway configured?

It was quite easy to get configured. Keeping is just a matter of add/del/chg
SMTP gateway recipients via the ADMIN program. The key here was to use domain names rather than machine names in recipients addresses to eliminate changes of multiple users in the SMTP lists. Let the UNIX smarthost do the work.

|> 2) Do MS-Mail postoffices require an additional and expensive
|>    "downstream" module to route or send SMTP mail to the gateway
|>    or to translate MS-Mail to Internet style addresses? A Microsoft
|>    rep has claimed the SMTP gateway package is all we need.

I was told amd so does the manual, that a dedicated PC was required. Anyway
I just bought a cheap 286 with 2 MB RAM and a 40 MB HD and it works fine.

|> 3) MS-DOS is single tasking, I assume one SMTP connection at a time?
|>    Does this create real problems? What are they?

A small test just showed me it would only handle one incoming SMTP connect
at a time. The other one said:
admin@pscpcs... Connecting to pscpcs via ether...
Trying 192.9.210.7... Connection refused by pscpcs
admin@pscpcs... Deferred: Connection refused by pscpcs

Pushing the sendmail queue 5 seconds later did accept the connect though. I
have not yet seen a problem.

|> 4) Any problem with the gateway wedging up? If so, any workarounds?

This is where I has the headaches. Initially I had 2 3Com 3c503s in the
gateway machine which the doc says is supported with either FTP's PCTCP
or Wollongong's TCP stack for the TCP/IP side. I tried both TCP setups
and the gateway machine kept hanging every so often, up to 5 or 6 times
a day. The third supported HW/SW cvonfig was Excelan board asnd their
software. This has been up for 6 months without a single hang. So I've quite
happy with it since then.

|> 5) Can you have multiple SMTP gateways on one LOCAL Area Network?
|> 6) Can you have multiple SMTP gateways on one WIDE Area Network?
|> 7) If yes to 5 or 6, how do you route mail to the correct gateway?
|> 
I don't know as I don't have this requirement.

Hope this helps, Kyle
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Kyle Tucker - Email Administrator  | 		Progress Software Corporation
tucker@bedford.progress.com 	   |		14 Oak Park
(617)280-4565			   |		Bedford, Mass. 01730
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mikebo@i88.isc.com (Michael Borowiec) writes:
|If anyone has gone the MS-MAIL with SMTP gateway route, I'd be 
|interested in your experiences so far. Especially...

|1) How hard it is to get/keep the gateway configured?
	For a small number of people, fairly easy.  We have
	an experimental (proof of concept) service for our
	own department. We have some 103 people, of which
	13 have their mail redirected to a MS-MAIL post office
	from the ccs.yorku.ca mail nail-server.

	Registration has to be kept in sync manually, so we simply send mail
	to each other when someone changes.  This is perfectly possible for
	13 people, scales badly for 100 people and is probably the
	definitive bad idea for the whole staff (we have about 16,146
	mailboxes for non-students at last count: lord knows how
	many undergrads we have)
.
|2) Do MS-Mail postoffices require an additional and expensive
|   "downstream" module to route or send SMTP mail to the gateway
|   or to translate MS-Mail to Internet style addresses? A Microsoft
|   rep has claimed the SMTP gateway package is all we need.

	I'll have to ask...

|3) MS-DOS is single tasking, I assume one SMTP connection at a time?
|   Does this create real problems? What are they?

	Well, the queue gets long (:-))  We  process 150-200 K messages
	a month (that's only 5,000 - 6,000 per day) so a single
	gateway wouldn't work for a large configuration.  Assume the
	delivery rate and processing rate aggregate to about one message
	per 30 seconds and we'd need something like 3 gateways.  As
	messages get larger or the arrival times get lower, the
	need would go up, of course.

|4) Any problem with the gateway wedging up? If so, any workarounds?

	Yup: don't use a PC.  We had a amchine that was too small
	initially and it hung due to an out-of-memory problem
	with some regularity.  Throwwing hardware at it fixed the
	problem.

|5) Can you have multiple SMTP gateways on one LOCAL Area Network?

	As I understand it, the number of gateways is mostly
	a naming issue: some machine gateways for a given
	named aggregate (in our case ``ccs'').  We are going
	to see if we can add a second community to the same gateway
	Real Soon Now (:-)).

|6) Can you have multiple SMTP gateways on one WIDE Area Network?

	Yup.

|7) If yes to 5 or 6, how do you route mail to the correct gateway?

	On a per-domain or per-person basis, accept the mail at an
	intermediate machine and route there. We use zmailer and
	can route domains via a ``routes'' override file and
	people via a normal alias file.  If you use sendfail(8)
	you'd best use aliases.

	In general, a community is going to have more than one
	``religion'' of mailer, and you will have to do the 
	following as a general (and also worst) case:

	for each in named-communitys; do
		find sysadmin*2, novell server, nlm, \
			pc, gateway software, unix server;
		register all users at each end
		coordinate aliases between gateways
		while :; do
			for day in workdays; do
				monitor
				amend
			done
		done
	done

	Not too different from managing our old PROFS system.

--dave
-- 
David Collier-Brown,  | davecb@CCS.YorkU.CA | lethe!dave
72 Abitibi Ave.,      | 
Willowdale, Ontario,  | York Postmaster and
CANADA. 416-223-8968  | occasional sendfail(8) consultant.

In article <1993Jan7.135641.1904@progress.com> tucker@bedford.progress.COM writes:
>In article <1993Jan07.035947.15311@i88.isc.com>, mikebo@i88.isc.com (Michael Borowiec) writes:
>|> If anyone has gone the MS-MAIL with SMTP gateway route, I'd be 
>|> interested in your experiences so far. Especially...
>|> 
... stuff deleted ...
>
>|> 4) Any problem with the gateway wedging up? If so, any workarounds?
>
>This is where I has the headaches. Initially I had 2 3Com 3c503s in the
>gateway machine which the doc says is supported with either FTP's PCTCP
>or Wollongong's TCP stack for the TCP/IP side. I tried both TCP setups
>and the gateway machine kept hanging every so often, up to 5 or 6 times
>a day. The third supported HW/SW cvonfig was Excelan board asnd their
>software. This has been up for 6 months without a single hang. So I've quite
>happy with it since then.
>
This would seem to indicate that the problem was in the FTP & Wollongong
TCP stacks... since I believe Excelan runs their stack on an onboard
processor instead of the main system CPU... 'Course it could be Microsoft's
fault as they are known to do wanton things with MS-DOS systems programs.
Anyone else?

>Hope this helps, Kyle

Yes, thanks Kyle and all who responded...
- Mike


--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Michael Borowiec  (N9EUZ)  -  mikebo@timesink.chi.il.us  -  mikebo@isc.com
  >>> Dedicated to the Pursuit of Computer Assisted Time Dissipation <<<
--------------------------------------------------------------------------

|> If anyone has gone the MS-MAIL with SMTP gateway route, I'd be 
|> interested in your experiences so far. Especially...

We are running this gateway on LWP 4.1 and it has been since I installed it
two weeks without errors.  Our load is still fairly small so I don't know how 
much this might help.

ptrubey@netcom.com (Phil Trubey) writes:

> We have found that our SMTP gateway stays up for about a day at a time
> before the MM program freezes (interestingly enough the machine usually
> can still be pinged while the gateway program is frozen).

I have seen this as well (a _lot_).  A client's gateway (which handles
a lot of traffic, ~500 messages/day) used to freeze in much the same way
after ~1 hour.  We replaced the hardware with a solid 33MHz 386, two
SMC cards, etc, and pushed up the MTBF to ~4 hours.  We now have a 
TSR that reboots the machine every hour :-).  Kludgey, but it's all
that we can do, until MS fix their mailer (or I can persuade their
PtBs to trash MS-Mail -- a far better option, although logistically
difficult with some 30-odd mailboxes and 5-6000 users).
 
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 Paul Nash                                         paul@frcs.Alt.ZA
 Box 12475, Onderstepoort, 0110 South Africa         +27-12-5611879

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