DNS and Backup Mail Server

[Drew Tomlinson]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Mark Foster" <mark at foster.cc>
To: "FreeBSD Questions" <freebsd-questions at freebsd.org>
Sent: Friday, May 09, 2003 12:44 PM
Subject: Re: DNS and Backup Mail Server


> Your setup provides failover only if blacklamb is unavailable. Even then
> it is a manual failover (requires your intervention to fix).
> Even better would be to have an additional MX record of lower priority
> (higher number = lower priority) that would queue the mail for you in
> case of another outage. That server should be "out there" on the
> Internet.

Thank you for your input.  I don't mind the "manual failover" aspect.  It's
just my own server for my own mail and receives less than 500 messages per
day (most from freebsd-*).  The only time it "fails" is when I'm mucking
with it.  :)  In this case it was vinum config and I really screwed it up.

> If you choose to do that, you'll need to find someone willing to do the
> backup MX hosting for you. It's really easy to setup the backup. Ask a
> friend.

I will do that if I ever find a friend that runs a mail server.  At this
time most of my friends can't even figure out how to run their mail client
on Windows.

> Oh, and setting up postfix on blacksheep as *backup* is probably not
> what you want... but I could be wrong. If the users/aliases don't exist
> on blacksheep it might reject the mail.

Actually I think I have this one OK as I can telnet to blacksheep on port 25
and issue mail commands to simulate mail addressed to @mykitchentable.net
and it gets forwarded to blacklamb as is should.  I should also mention that
I've been able to do this on both the 10.2 and 1.2 interfaces.  It's just
that when I change the NAT entry in my router, I never see any connections
initiated to blacksheep.  And unfortunately the logging facilities on the
3Com are minimal so I don't know where the failure occurs.

Drew