As I've stated, my Mac is multihomed, looking at the campus network and the dorm network which are 2 completely separate physical networks with different ISPs. Right now, there is a mail server on the dorm network which acts as the primary smtp server. The secondary mail server lies on the campus network. This is set up this way because we see the administrative campus network as priority, and if something happens we send the mail out the dorm network to increase our % of receiving the page, and decreasing the % of getting 10,000 calls from users. If Anything on the campus network goes down, including the connection to the internet... No problem. Out the dorm network it goes, my phone vibrates, life is good, users are happy.
Anything on the dorm network goes down... Maybe not so good. If the dorm ISP or core connection go down, Intermapper will successfully connect to the e-mail server on the dorm network (again, the primary mail server) but the mail (actually a page to <phonenumber>@messaging.nextel.com) can't get to the internet from the server since the internet connection on the dorm network has failed. Perhaps SMTP dependency on a device is in order? Perhaps per map SMTP settings? Perhaps a SMTP server on the local machine that is smart enough to fail-over? Any other suggestions?
Well, in your current configuration, if the dorm network's ISP uplink goes down, InterMapper will successfully deliver the message to the dorm SMTP server, but the message will be stuck there waiting for the uplink (to Nextel) to come back. There's no way for InterMapper to use an external SMTP host and know that that host has succeeded in its own delivery. You'd need to build an SMTP host into InterMapper (or use the deliberately broken one in MOSX or the broken one IIS provides), and force it not to deliver to intermediate hosts to avoid hang-ups between IM and the *final* destination host (which you might not even know).
As for your first scenario of trying to send directly through the mail server listed in the host address, I don't think nextel will give my machine relay rights :-D is that what you were envisioning?
If you're sending to <phonenumber>@messaging.nextel.com, messaging.nextel.com should accept messages from anywhere on the Internet, since it's a local recipient.
Of course, the SMTP server could be broken, in which case you're still SOL.
To work around a broken SMTP server, you'd need to send messages back to IM and test receipt, which is a large substantial mail-server-checking problem, and still doesn't address problems outside your test loop (coverage to the cellphone/pager)...
Perhaps IM should have a checkbox for individual email recipients to force delivery to the hostname in the email address rather than the 'normal' SMTP server. Then you could get a pager for someone else on another network entirely, to avoid dependence on nextel...
Chris Pepper -- Chris Pepper: <http://www.reppep.com/~pepper/> Rockefeller University: <http://www.rockefeller.edu/>
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