[Wolves] Mail mx plan

[James Turner]

On Sunday 13 Feb 2005 21:26, Wayne Morris wrote:
> I'm thinking of implementing the following scheme for mail for my domain.
>
> Two mailservers on my lan, one primary one secondary.

This seems a bit decadent. I'm not sure there is much advantage to having more 
than one if they are on the same network and using the same Internet pipe. 
(of course, this may not be the case with your setup)

> No-ip 's mail servers to route mail to primary, secondary and finally to
> no-ip's back up mailserver.
>
> So all I have to do to implement this would be to set up Exim on
> Secondary to accept relaying for Primary, and to set up
> primary to accept relaying from Secondary?
>
> Or is there a better way?

Here's how I'd initially think of doing it:

For incoming messages:

I presume the end users will be accessing mail from mailboxes on primary... If 
this is correct then primary should be configured so that messages for the 
domain are accepted into the local mailboxes, while secondary and the no-ip 
backup should be configured to store-and-forward mails for the domain onwards 
to primary. If there is any problem or prolonged network delay with primary 
the messages will go to one of the others instead (chosen according to 
priority set up in the DNS) to be stored and forwarded when the problem is 
resolved.

For outgoing messages:

One or more of the servers could be configured to transfer outgoing messages. 
For each outgoing mail server, relaying should be allowed for the IP ranges 
containing the client machines which will be sending mail - optionally with 
authentication required too. A simple way to load balance the outgoing mail 
across the servers would be to use round-robin DNS.

Regards,

James