This may sound silly, but with a user base of just 300 it sounds feasible to have all of your users set up a second email account in their email client to point to the second mail server. In that case you could leave them both on all of the time and users would be able to send and retrieve mail from both. The user accounts would be identical except for mail servers referenced.
This way, if for some reason mail a sending mail server delivers to your backup instead of primary (maybe a network glitch causes them to see the primary as unavailable even if it is), then mail still gets delivered to your users. When one goes down, the other is available for them to send/receive. Your main problem is syncing the registry between them. If you consider the backup only to be formally used when the primary goes down, then you can schedule one-way transfers, and only reverse it when the primary comes back up after an outage. Requires a bit of management, but it seems to be what you're looking for... Another thing to consider is moving your mail server to a disaster-proof hosting center. We're in Tampa, but weren't overly concerned about our equipment for that reason. Then the concern becomes appropriate redundant network connectivity to reach the hosting center and internet, as well as offsite backups. It did get us thinking about opening up another datacenter in Atlanta, Raleigh, Charlotte, or Herndon, though... Darin. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Sharyn Schmidt" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Friday, August 20, 2004 7:19 AM Subject: RE: [IMail Forum] Setting up another mail server at a remote site Another option would be to periodically re-import the user registry data. Yes, I had thought of that too. Matter of fact, I was thinking that perhaps I could set up some sort of batch file/scheduled task to do that. Here's where I've got some questions. When the primary does down are you/they expecting to be able to see the e-mail that was received on the primary when you are connecting to the backup? And in reverse, when the primary comes back up is the expectation to be able to see e-mail that was received on the backup when you start connecting to the primary again? These are both good questions. I'd say no to both. At the moment, when the primary server is down, there is *no* email. I believe people would be very happy to have current email, and be able to retrieve whatever was on the primary server, after it's back up. Same deal on the backup. The driving thought behind this is to at least have *some* sort of email connectivity, if the primary is down. Hurricane Charley was an eye opener here! If people will accept e-mail stored on the primary being unavailable when the primary is down and e-mail received by the backup not automagically appearing on the primary the task becomes a lot simpler. Yes, this will be the expectation. Good word, automagically, I may have to use that again! No one is expecting to be able to view the same mail on both servers at the same time, and have them magically transferred to whatever server is up at the moment. Most download their mail to their email client anyway. It would make sense to have an authoritative slave running in your backup data center. You'll automatically get updates you make on your master nameserver and some of the cost of backup data center could be assigned to DNS backup (although a 'dig' on todhunter.com shows you're pretty well covered in that respect). I had planned to set up the second mail server very similar to my primary one, as in , my mailserver in my main site here is also my primary name server. A second mailserver, in a remote site would also serve as a secondary nameserver. It was my intent to get rid of the durocom slaves as they are just doing me a personal favor by letting me use their servers. Keep in mind that any network hiccups that prevent someone from reaching the primary will cause them to attempt to reach your backup. Also spammers will often go after lower priority MX's with the assumption that they're less protected. Because I have the full support of the bigwigs (finally!!!) I have been given the go ahead to spend what I need to ( I tried to justify a gym, pool, and jacuzzi to help with stress but that didn't fly). I had planned on putting declude virus and junkmail on the second mail server to prevent this type of thing from happening. My second mailserver will be configured exactly like my first, except the IP address. Of course, if the OHN in Imail is the same on both servers (and it will be I think) theoretically I should be able to use the same license. Except that is probably cheating and I'm anal about licensing. That would certainly cut down on spammers going after the backup :-) LOL yeah, it would, but ideally that is not what I want to do. I'd prefer to have the smtp service up, running and ready to go, although I am flexible on this. I guess my main concern here is that I understand what I'm doing in DNS. The last thing I want to do is hose my main mail server cause I fudged up the DNS entries. I was also confused about the official host name in IMAIL but I think I'm straight on that now. I would also want my users to be able to access webmail on the second server when the first is down, by going to something like http://mail2.todhunter.com:8383 or whatever I decide to call it. An A record in DNS should take care of that though. Sharyn We are the worldwide producer and marketer of the award winning Cruzan Single Barrel Rum, judged "Best in the World" at the annual San Francisco Wine and Spirits Championships. For more information, please click (go to) <html><a href=ttp://www.cruzanrums.com">www.cruzanrums.com</a></html> To Unsubscribe: http://www.ipswitch.com/support/mailing-lists.html List Archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/imail_forum%40list.ipswitch.com/ Knowledge Base/FAQ: http://www.ipswitch.com/support/IMail/ To Unsubscribe: http://www.ipswitch.com/support/mailing-lists.html List Archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/imail_forum%40list.ipswitch.com/ Knowledge Base/FAQ: http://www.ipswitch.com/support/IMail/
