Sunday
Dec022007
nginx: high performance smpt/pop/imap proxy
Sunday, December 2, 2007 at 11:59AM
nginx is a high performance smtp/pop/imap proxy that lets you do custom authorization and lookups and is very scalable. (just add nodes)
Nginx by default is a reverse proxy and this is what it is doing here for pop/imap connections. It is also an excellelent reverse proxy for web servers.
Advantage: You dont have to have a speacial database or ldap schema. Just an url to do auth and lookup with.
A url that may be accessed by a unix or a tcp socket. Write your own auth handler - according to your own policy.
For example:
A user called atif tries to login with the pass testxyz.
You pass this infomation to a URL such as
socket:/var/tmp/xyz.sock
or
http://auth.corp.mailserver.net:someport/someurl
The auth server replies with either a FAILURE such as
Auth-Status: Invalid Login or password
or with a success such as
Auth-Status: OK
Auth-Server: OneOfThe100Servers
Auth-Port: optionalyAPort
We have implemented it at our ISP and it has saves us a lot of headaches.
This would work for both imap and pop.
I have not yet tried for SMTP.
Nginx by default is a reverse proxy and this is what it is doing here for pop/imap connections. It is also an excellelent reverse proxy for web servers.
Advantage: You dont have to have a speacial database or ldap schema. Just an url to do auth and lookup with.
A url that may be accessed by a unix or a tcp socket. Write your own auth handler - according to your own policy.
For example:
A user called atif tries to login with the pass testxyz.
You pass this infomation to a URL such as
socket:/var/tmp/xyz.sock
or
http://auth.corp.mailserver.net:someport/someurl
The auth server replies with either a FAILURE such as
Auth-Status: Invalid Login or password
or with a success such as
Auth-Status: OK
Auth-Server: OneOfThe100Servers
Auth-Port: optionalyAPort
We have implemented it at our ISP and it has saves us a lot of headaches.
This would work for both imap and pop.
I have not yet tried for SMTP.
Reader Comments (3)
http://nginx.net/
This is the type of article I've been missing. =)
Jeff,
Thanks, I might blog more about but real smallscale suff does not sound so popular here.
very nice piece of software. fast and easy to config!