mail loop problems?

Re: mail loop problems?

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At 9:34 AM -0800 12/20/99, Higher Powered wrote:
>Thanks for the quick reply- You have got to be one of the fastest on the net
>:)

<grin> I just happened to be reading email when you posted.

>ok- I fixed the small problems (the secondary server will go up temporarly
>after the new year). I didn't quite understand the following:
>
>>Interesting... You have two MX records in the foothillstrading.com
>> domain. Remember to use the @server option with dig.
>
>What is @server and how do I use it, and I'm not sure what you mean by two
>mx records. Do I not need to have postal.higherpowered.com point to the
>mail server address in every record?

I'm assuming that you're using dig on a command-line (*nix-type) host. So you might issue the command like this:
dig @taoist.higherpowered.com foothillstrading.com mx

This will ask your primary server for MX records for one of your domains. This gives the following result:

;; ANSWER SECTION:
foothillstrading.com. 1D IN MX 20 postal2.higherpowered.com.
foothillstrading.com. 1D IN MX 10 postal.higherpowered.com.

As you can see, you have two MX records in this domain. This is not a problem - it is in fact a good thing (assuming both mail servers are working properly).

I called it interesting because you claimed that dig wasn't finding any MX records for this domain.

>I'm not sure I follow- I thought every dns record needed a reverse file.
>The main machine(web server) here is www.higherpowered.com, along with the
>name server taoist.higherpowered.com and the mail server
>postal.higherpowered.com
>
>>The reason for this is that you have configured a reverse zone file
>> on your own servers (which may or may not end up being a legitimate
>> place to put such a file...). In this file, you have these records:
>> 162.125.1.208.in-addr.arpa. PTR www.foothillstrading.com.
>> 162.125.1.208.in-addr.arpa. PTR www.michaeltyler.com.
>> 162.125.1.208.in-addr.arpa. PTR www.fennel.net.
>> 162.125.1.208.in-addr.arpa. PTR www.ultimateweavers.com.
>> 162.125.1.208.in-addr.arpa. PTR www.ultimatefurniture.com.
>> 162.125.1.208.in-addr.arpa. PTR www.gacapitolassociates.com.
>> 162.125.1.208.in-addr.arpa. PTR taoist.higherpowered.com.
>> 162.125.1.208.in-addr.arpa. PTR www.higherpowered.com.
>>
>> This is counterproductive, as you discovered with MacTCP Watcher - it
>> gave you an essentially randomly chosen record from this set. To
>> solve this, if your server ends up legitimately authoritative for
>> your reverse zone, you'll pick one of these records and delete the
>> rest.

No, you don't need a PTR record for every A record. That is a common misconception. You should have a PTR record for every address.
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