Re: [cobalt-developers] Replacing sendmail - backup MX?

[Jeff Lasman <jblists@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Kevin D wrote:

> Would it be possible for you to explain how to setup a backup MX to me? I am
> familiar with DNS programming both manually and via the raq,

The DNS part of a backup mailserver (which I somewhat incorrectly called
"backup MX" previously) is easy.

You've already got an entry something like:

  domain.com.   IN MX 10 mail.domain.com.

and you need to add, right under that:

  domain.com.   IN MX 20 backupmachine.itsdomain.com.

(Note that the "." at the end of each domain is REQUIRED and IMPORTANT.)

That part is easy.  Setting up backupmachine.itsdomain.com is a bit more
complex.  The method I use requires the use of mailertable, which is NOT
implemented on a Cobalt RaQ (as I recall).

What you do is set up your mailserver to accept relaying for the domain
in question (domain.com) and you set mailertable so it'll try to send it
to mail.domain.com instead of to the mail-servers pointed to by the MX
records (if it used MX records it would just go into a loop, which is
NOT what we want).

I haven't done this in over a year, but as I recall, that seems correct.

> but I'm not
> sure how to set up a backup MX...this would be very useful as I have a
> second server that does SMTP and backing up the Raq's SMTP would be nice.
> (It's already gone down once).

If your second server is NOT a RaQ then you can find detailed
instructions at "http://www.sendmail.org/"; I'm sure.

Jeff
-- 
Jeff Lasman <jblists@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
nobaloney.net
P. O. Box 52672
Riverside, CA  92517
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