Racer X <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes on 27 September 1999 at 12:19:57 -0700
> publishing an MX host that is never reachable seems pretty broken to me. it
> may be technically permitted, i suppose it's not explicitly forbidden
> anywhere, but publishing the record is like saying "what if 2 plus 2 equals
> 5?" interesting concept but pointless to bother with it. the firewall is
> clouding the issue.
Actually, I think the "permanently broken" MX host itself is clouding
the issue. I get the impression that some people have strong feelings
that we shouldn't change things to help out people with lazy "bad"
configurations; they should be punished for their sins. I'm even
capable of feeling that way myself with just a little encouragement
:-) .
So, suppose that the hypothetical host is in fact only broken for 1
month (they didn't update the DNS because they expected the new part
to arrive any day, and then it was DOA and they had to start over, and
because they believed that MTAs would fail over to their secondary MX,
and they didn't realize their firewall was accepting the connection
and then leaving it hanging). What is the appropriate MTA behavior in
this case? It seems clear to me that what everybody would want in
this situation is for an MTA to fail over to the secondary MX.
Should we be giving any consideration to the question of whether, on
the average, secondary MXs are less reliable than primary? I don't
think we should; I don't think we should warp the implementation to
accommodate incorrectly configured systems. (If we can accommodate
them with some change that *doesn't* warp things, then we should; "be
generous in what you accept").
--
David Dyer-Bennet ***NOTE ADDRESS CHANGES*** [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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