I'd like to get some ideas/thoughts from the group on how to setup a backup mail server plan. A couple of weeks ago, Kansas City had it's worst ice storm ever and practically shut down the city for a couple of days. Fortunately, the building I'm in only lost power for about 12 hrs. However, in our business 12 hours is a long time to go without email! :-)
I've been tasked with creating a Contingency Plan in the event of circuit, power, equipment failure. Our current setup is a single Dell 2400 box running NT 4.0 and Imail 7.04 connected to a T1 through Sprint in an office building in Kansas City. (whew) Our corporate office is in New York in a wired building and could act as an warm/hot site in the event of a failure in Kansas City. (Their connection speed is much slower but would suffice for a short period of time or could be scaled up.) I am also looking into the cost for co-locating our server in a true ISP data center which would better protect us from circuit/power loss. (Whether I do this or not, I still need a 2nd box in case of a hardware failure on the first.) My questions are this: 1) Does anyone have a system setup and working like this? If so, some general configuration notes would be nice. 2) If Box 1 goes down, what's the best way to switch to backup box 2 (MX records?) 3) What about the mailboxes on box 1 if it crashes? Are they gone? 4) Do I need to maintain duplicate user accounts on both boxes? 5) If box 1 goes down for a bit... and I switch to box 2.... then get box 1 back up and running. Can I get email that is sitting on box 2 over to box 1? Easily? :-) I'm sure someone in the group has/is dealing with this and can provide some great insight to all of us! BTW: I'm being told the 4-6 hours for the mail server to be down is the max during business hours... is that typical of your organization? Matthew Brandes, MCSE Information Technology Manager Integra Realty Resources 913.748.4720 (voice) 913.236.4307 (fax) [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.irr.com Please visit http://www.ipswitch.com/support/mailing-lists.html to be removed from this list. An Archive of this list is available at: http://www.mail-archive.com/imail_forum%40list.ipswitch.com/
