[TriLUG] RR Mail Infrastructure

Steve Williams spwilliamsjr at hotmail.com
Tue Jul 29 13:16:18 EDT 2003


The answer to your question is pretty simple, and in 2 parts.

1)  RR was formed as a joint venture some 4-5 years ago between Time Warner
Cable, Media One (now Comcast), Compaq, Microsoft, and Advance-Newhouse.
(Its since been taken in solely by TW Cable)  Sites launched before the
joint venture used various email solutions, those launched afterwards used
MS software on Compaq hardware (go figure).  Truth be told, the MCIS system
was a highly-scalable, robust email system that serviced RR very well - as
long as enough hardware was kept in the pipeline to match the scaling (which
wasnt always the case).  There were also design issues that caused some
large and high-profile outages and slow-downs due to those - but they were
corrected and the system functioned well up until it was turned off.
Microsoft stopped development of MCIS a few years ago - this more than any
other reason is why a new mail solution was designed and deployed.

2)  Recently, RR has switched to a new mail solution that runs on a Unix
platform.  So far, this system has proven no more but no less reliable than
the MS system it replaced - it merely scales better to the current load
(which was a large part of why the old system had failures from time to
time, anyways).

There is no magic dust that makes email (or anything) run better on
Unix/Linux/BSD/etc - tons of design/architectural/redundancy details go into
running a system that can handle the loads of a large high-speed ISP.  All
you, as a customer, see is an MS banner, problems with stability, and 2+2 =
MS sucks.

While I'm not an MS fan, I certainly dont use that methodology.

-Steve

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Lance A. Brown" <lance at bearcircle.net>
To: <trilug at trilug.org>
Sent: Tuesday, July 29, 2003 11:46 AM
Subject: [TriLUG] RR Mail Infrsastructure (was RE: e-mail server class)


> I've had my SmartHost set to RR for over a year and only rarely have
> problems getting mail delivered in a timely fashion.  It's the inbound
> email that was so nasty I got off it completely.
>
> On Tue, 2003-07-29 at 11:06, Ben Pitzer wrote:
> > Some might argue that there is a speed/latency issue here, but the fact
is
> > that RR's outbound servers are working just fine these days.  Better
than
> > ever, in fact, and we are going to be doing some rebuilds and tuning in
the
> > coming weeks to improve them even further, and implement outbound spam
> > filtering, so that if a customer's PC does get infected by a virus, it
will
> > stand a much smaller chance of getting spread to anyone else.
>
> This statement leads me to believe you work for RR and/or have some
> contact with their mail infrastructure.
>
> If so, can you share any information on why they are using Microsoft
> products for their mail infrastructure instead of a UNIX or Linux
> solution?  It seems to me it would be a LOT smarter to use a UNIX/Linux
> solution.
>
> Thanks,
>   --[Lance]
>
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