separate email and web on 2 server setup

[dinsdale]

I thought about separating my mail and web server for performance and security reasons. Server1 should only serve webpages, server2 only email. Both should be administered in the same ispconfig 3 instance.

My idea was to not actually mirror the servers but in order to be able to save space keep web documents only on the 1st and email only on the second.

I have followed the recent tutorial about clustering ( http://www.howtoforge.com/installing...th-ispconfig-3 ) and skipped the steps with GlusterFS. The database is replicating but obviously I cannot create a mailbox on server 2 from the ispconfig panel on server 1.

Is there a way of achieving this or am I on the wrong track?

Both machines will be hosted as vm's (on the same machine) and I'm using lvm volumes for /var/www and /var/vmail respectively. Could this help in any way?

[till]

You will have to disable mirroring for the second server in the ispconfig server settings to be able to craete email accounts on it separately from the first server.

[dinsdale]

After some testing i found that surprisingly ispconfig3 with the configpanel on server1 does also create the user accounts for email users on the filesystem of server2 if the ipsconfig db is mirrored. It also creates the web configuration on server2 but that's fine since it takes up almost no space at all.

All I seem to have to do now is to point the mx record and the webmail subdomain to the second server in the DNS settings.

There seems to be a check every 10 seconds if something has changed in the database since the directories are being created (and deleted for that matter) at the same time after a short delay. What a great architecture.