Platform Independant

As with all NetWin products, SurgeMail can be run on the platform of your choice. Currently our standard builds are available for:

• Windows (NT/XP/Vista/Windows 7/Windows 8/2008/2012,... )
• Linux (32 & 64bit)
  
• Solaris Sparc (8+)
• FreeBSD
• MacOSX.

This has the advantage that you can start on a platform you are familiar with, but can move your mail server to another platform with minimal effort or cost if you need to. Possible reasons could include scalability upgrades, hardware constraints or political issues.

In fact it is so easy that you can setup a live system to mirror to another host which may be another platform, then change the DNS records and you will have moved your mail server.

Which platform do we recommend?

Each platform has it's own limitations (file handles, threads etc), in addition other issues (porting problems, faulty libraries, non standard behaviour, buggy threading libraries etc all impact various systems) as a result some are better than others. Also in some cases the simple number of customers running on the same system make it a better choice. So we do recommend the following, particularly for 'large' systems: (in no particular order)

• Linux
• Windows

Systems with no known significant limitations/faults

• Windows - No known issues.
• Linux - No known issues.
• Mac OSX - No known issues.
• Solaris 8,9 sparc - No known issues.

Systems with known issues:

• FreeBSD - Threading library is faulty when used with 'fork', possibly resolved in freebsd5. This fault is not critical but is irritating, it doesn't seem to impact SurgeMail in any known way.
• Solaris 7 sparc- Limited to 250 fopen() handles, so only supports 200 mail sessions concurrently. We very strongly recommend the use of solaris 8 or solaris 9 instead.
• Solaris 8,9 x86 - Limited to 250 fopen() handles (as a result we don't support this platform)

 

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