mail server cannot be found...

Re: mail server cannot be found...

From:

Date:

Time:

On 01/13/00 at 15:22, Higher Powered wrote:

> When I look up "a" records for domains in my dns, using dig, there seems to
> be nothing.
>
> Ex:
> foothillstrading.com
> michaeltyler.com

A zone transfer from taoist.higherpowered.com (your name server, no?) using
dig yields:

; <<>> DiG 2.2 <<>> @taoist.higherpowered.com foothillstrading.com axfr
; (1 server found)
foothillstrading.com. 86400 SOA taoist.higherpowered.com.
webmaster.high
erpowered.com. (
2000011301 ; serial
28800 ; refresh (8 hours)
7200 ; retry (2 hours)
604800 ; expire (7 days)
86400 ) ; minimum (1 day)
foothillstrading.com. 86400 NS taoist.higherpowered.com.
foothillstrading.com. 86400 NS taoist2.higherpowered.com.
foothillstrading.com. 86400 MX 10 postal.higherpowered.com.
foothillstrading.com. 86400 MX 20 postal2.higherpowered.com.
www.foothillstrading.com. 86400 A 208.1.125.162
foothillstrading.com. 86400 SOA taoist.higherpowered.com.
webmaster.high
erpowered.com. (
2000011301 ; serial
28800 ; refresh (8 hours)
7200 ; retry (2 hours)
604800 ; expire (7 days)
86400 ) ; minimum (1 day)
;; Received 7 answers (7 records).
;; FROM: croc.homes-magazine.com to SERVER: 208.1.125.162
;; WHEN: Thu Jan 13 15:52:02 2000

There's one A record in the zone (for www.foothillstrading.com.). There's not
an A record for foothillstrading.com., which is important to note for the
discussion below. A zone transfer for michaeltyler.com. gives a similar
result. Querying taoist for www.foothillstrading.com. yields the proper A
record, as does a similar query for www.michaeltyler.com.

Queries to taoist2 result in a 'Connection refused'. Is that your secondary
name server that is not yet up?

> When I look up "a" records that are still in my isp's dns, they look fine(or
> at least to me).
> ex:
> ezineadsource.com
>
> These domains have been working fine, however.
> MY ptr records are still messed up, I need to contact my isp. what do I
> tell them?

Who has authority for the 125.1.208.in-addr.arpa zone? Your ISP? If so, you
need to have them add the proper PTR records to it.

> Here's my problem now. I cannot send mail to my mail server- I have
> had mail problems ever since I set up QDNS, and have not been able to
> get things to work right. Now I have to get them working, but I don't
> know where the problem is. I know the secondary dns and mail servers
> are not up yet- but I wouldn't think this would be the problem. Since
> the mail never shows up at the mail server, I assume it's not the mail
> server. Also, the mail server gives me an error relating to not being
> able to find a dns record for foothillstrading.com.

When you say the mail never shows up at the server, is that from
examination of the server log, or is it just that the mail is never
delivered to the proper local mailbox? It sounds like your mail server
doesn't know that it's supposed to be the MX for foothillstrading.com, so
it's trying to relay the mail on to the host 'foothillstrading.com'. That
would explain why it's trying to resolve the domain name. The error is
generated because there's no A or CNAME record for foothillstrading.com., so
it won't resolve. If you haven't already done so, set your mail server to an
appropriate logging level, send it a message for foothillstrading.com, and
then taking a look at the log. I wouldn't be surprised if you see a mail
loop happening. If this is the problem, you need to make the proper entry
in your Communigate router to let the server know that foothillstrading.com
is a local domain.

Also, you shouldn't have an MX record pointing to a host name that won't
resolve (there are no A or CNAME records for postal2 -- a CNAME is not
recommended for this purpose, though). As long as postal is alive, you should
be alright, since it has a lower preference value than postal2, so other SMTP
servers will probably never need to look up postal2. However, I think you're
living on the edge here. ;-) I'd remove the postal2 MX record until you
actually have a mail server up and running there, with the appropriate A
record. Anyway, postal.higherpowered.com returns pings and I can telnet to
port 25 to open an SMTP session with your Communigate server, so, as you say,
the mail server itself seems to be OK.

Christopher Bort

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