secondary MX (was Re: [TriLUG] co-lo or at home?)

[Tanner Lovelace]

On Sat, 2002-03-23 at 16:56, Lisa Lorenzin wrote:
> 
> > Do you have/know of a quick and dirty "secondary MX" HOWTO somewhere?
> 
> there's probably one out there already, but here's how to do it.  i'd be 
> happy to provide for you, if you're interested.

Hmm.. you do realize there are problems with having
MX records point to CNAME records (I believe that's actually
against the specfication).  I personally would be hesitant to 
point my backup mx to a dynamically allocated IP.  I
would rather not run the chance of it IP address changing in the
middle of mail delivery.

Lisa gave a very good description of how to setup sendmail,
here's how I do it using qmail:

You have to tell qmail to receive the mail so in 
/var/qmail/control/rcpthosts you add the domain
you're running backup for.  You also add the domain
to /var/qmail/control/smtproutes so it knows to
go directly there.  And, that's it.  (Lisa already
told how to set up the records in DNS.)  So, for an
example, I run backup mx for my friend Andy at 
spundreams.net.  in /var/qmail/control/rcpthosts I
have (maddux is the name of the machine)

localhost
maddux.wayfarer.org
wayfarer.org
spundreams.net

And then in /var/qmail/control/smtproutes I have:

spundreams.net:

Note the colon at the end.  You can add a machine
name there and it will deliver directly to that
machine, or you can leave it blank and it will
lookup the mx records in dns and deliver to ones
ranked lower than this machine.

It works quite well.  I switched back to cable
last week from dsl and while my A records took
anywhere from 1-2 days to catch up, since I had
my friend andy running backup mx for me, my mail
was still running as soon as he changed his
dns server to point to the new ip address.

Tanner
P.S. Perhaps we should poll all those who run
their own domains on the list and form a group
where we all do backup dns/mail for each other.
Any interest in that?
-- 
Tanner Lovelace | lovelace at wayfarer.org | http://wtl.wayfarer.org/
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