Master/Slave functionality?

[Del]

Hello everybody,

I was looking for an Exhange replacement in a mixed client environment,
and came across Kolab. It really seems like a fantastic project, and I
would like to learn more. The Master/slave functionality is very
interesting from several aspects, but there seems to be almost no
documentation as to what it does and how it works. I am more than happy
to contribute to the Kolab wiki on any information provided.

First up, I assume it is possible to have multiple slaves but only one
master. Can anybody confirm this?

Will slaves function as back-up e-mail servers by default? If so, I
assume it is necessary to set-up mx records for the slave in case the
master server crash?

Will Slaves mirror the Master by default, if so how is synchronisation
set-up (rsync and cron?, default time intervals?)? In particular,
does/can a Slave server function as a back-up of the entire Master
server?

It seems to be possible to allocate users to a Slave server. Is this
simply to route mail to the Slave for load balancing (i.e., distribute
the system workload among the servers) and/or distribute net traffic
(e.g., have the master and slave on separate locations/LAN-networks and
make sure mail and other data is sent, stored and served on the users
local network)?

Cheers,
Del