fault tolerant email?

[Jack Coats]

Larry,

I had a problem one time when a friend was hosting my email.  His server went
down for 3 months. ... I did transfer my domain to another machine in the mean
time.  But as a 'quick fix' to keep from having email lost, I had a friend who
owned an ISP allow delivery of my domains email there, and then I put 
him in as
a secondary MX record for my domain.

This is how the 'old school' did it, back when we didn't believe that would
always look out for our best interest. (And why one should never have just one
DNS server! ... mail servers are not as critical, but the reasoning is the
same).

Do I have a secondary now?  No. ... But my domain hosting company does a good
job of keeping the email and other services up.  It also is not as critical
today as it was then (I was just out of a job, and all my resumes refered to
that email address on the server that went away!)

Is having a secondary MX record and another mail server around worth it? ...
Depends on how much of a control freak you are and how much you need in 
the way
of redundancy in your life!

Now you have another point of view!

Quoting Larry Underhill <lgu at pobox.com>:

> Hi folks,
>
> My group has recently setup our own email infrastructure for a project
> we are running. Mail delivery and access via mutt is fine, but we are
> now looking at sane strategies for fault tolerance. Anybody have any
> pointers to resources or hard-won experience they would like to share?
>
> Some details:
>
> * Postfix + Courier IMAP on Debian
> * We have two servers in different datacenters. Server "A" is the one
> running mail services now. Server "B" is the one slated to provide
> redundancy/fail-over capabilities.
> * We have regular backups of Server "A" to tape.
> * Updating MX records in DNS is slow since we don't admin the
> authoritative DNS server.
>
> We're most interested in solving the problem of continuing to receive
> mail in the face of (a) serious hardware failure on the primary mail
> server (b) serious network failure to the datacenter the primary mail
> server is in.
>
> Any advice is truly appreciated!
>
> --Larry
>
>
>
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>



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