Moving a server and updating tables

Re: Moving a server and updating tables

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At 9:28 AM -0400 9/17/02, AHC list member wrote:
>Hey everyone,
>
>The time has come to where we have grown beyond serving on one box.
>Up until this point, I've run a primary and secondary DNS, along
>with Webstar 4.4 on two servers. One server took the brunt of our
>load, running http, ftp and pop for several years. With massive
>increases in mail traffic over the past 12 months, it's really grown
>beyond time to separate off at least the mail services to the second
>machine. We did such over the weekend, adding in all of the
>existing accounts from the primary server (we'll call .5) to the
>other server (.6)
>
>Webstar's mail has a bonus feature of supporting webmail, so during
>the transition from one box to the other, any straggler messages
>that came to .5 could be picked up via browser if the DNS for that
>individual's ISP had already updated and was directing POP requests
>to the new server (all old accounts on .5 have been left active).
>To make sure we didn't bounce anything, we set up MX records like so:
>
>mydomain.com MX 10 new.mail.server
>mydomain.com MX 20 old.mail.server

That wasn't necessary. If some other mail server has mail for one of
your domains, either it has the old MX record cached or it gets the
new one. Either way, the second MX record you added isn't going to
affect anything (unless your new mail server goes down - redundancy
can be a good thing if done properly).

>After all entries were completed, both of our DNS servers were restarted.
>
>Updating the DNS was simple enough, and for most of my customers,
>the transition went without a hitch.
>
>However, for two domains, and one email account on one domain, after
>nearly 60 hours, their POP clients continue to be pointed to the old
>server.

What DNS server are they using for lookups? Have the users of these
two domains tried rebooting?

>Their mail is being successfully collected on the new server. Both
>of the domains in question are served by two separate DSL carriers
>in North Carolina -- so I'm hoping their DNS systems are simply kind
>of slothish. However, the oddity is that the one email account POP
>client from one of our domains continues to go to the old server (it
>is a list serve POP account) while all other POP accounts for the
>same domain -- and all email from the outside, is properly routed to
>the new mail server. Very weird, as that list server lives under
>our roof, and has other list accounts which check the new server
>without issue for the same domain!

Check your DNS records for the domain in question, and check the
listserv's configuration to see if it's maybe gotten an IP address or
old hostname in the configuration for this list.

>Anyone have any ideas? Would I be better off removing the second MX
>record from each zone for a while and somehow forcing the clients to
>relookup to the new server on recalcitrant individual accounts or
>zones? (Boy, I hate the thought of re-entering them.

You should definitely remove the second MX record for the moment,
since the old mail server isn't configured properly as a relay server
for these domains - instead, it considers itself the final
destination for all of your domains.

>A second question: if I want to run the old server as a backup mail
>server, but don't want it to see any traffic to speak of unless the
>primary mail server goes down, what are the recommended MX priority
>settings?

What you quoted above will work fine, once the old mail server is
configured to relay all mail for your domains to the new server.

>I've currently set the MX records as stated above, but don't know
>the benefit of raising the value to 100, or 1000, or whatever. I
>tried 65000 for one zone, but my version of QDNS 3.0.1 gave funky
>errors (a negative number in the record) until I dropped it back
>down to 1000 on that test. Is this value like the load balancing
>numbers, where it is a ratio of hits rather than a fall-over order?

No. MX records are designed to allow fail over service. Check your
favorite DNS reference for details on how this works.
____________________________________________________________________
Chris Buxton Men & Mice
support@menandmice.com Making DNS Easy

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