Thanks for the input. Here is how it turned out, and my summary of the
situation.
I own both servers, and have been trying to figure out the best
implimentation of redundancy.
By having the secondary server in place, the primary server was slowed down,
but it never failed to accept or deliver mail the whole time. Granted,
while the secondary was trying to feed into the primary, some new incoming
was pushed off onto the secondary.
I feel that this put very little legitimate mail at risk. Keep in mind, I
did not know for sure that I could dump the spam, yet. I only knew that if
I waited long enuf, it would eventually clear out.
My mistake was that I had two virtual domains running on that secondary
server throughout all of this. Lack of time(read as lazyness) is the only
reason that I had never moved them off of this particular server. Incoming
mail for these two domains was working fine, but outgoing mail was being
held up in the queue. Lesson here is do not put primary functions on a
secondary machine. It removes your ability to just turn it off while you
think about the problem.
I responded to 'jf' on his problem, and the fix I used is listed there.
My feeling is that this old 486 I used as a secondary MX cost me almost
nothing and saved my butt by giving some options I would not have had
otherwise. It has been great when my dedicated line customers have had to
be down for a bit, or their servers have gone down to be able to cache their
mail, and tell them that as soon as their server is back up, that I can
provide them all their 'lost' mail.
Sam
----- Original Message -----
From: "Harald Hanche-Olsen" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Friday, December 15, 2000 6:51 AM
Subject: Secondary MX (Was: Mail flood in queue)
+ "Mark Delany" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
| > My qmail server is the secondary MX for domain tri.net.
| > mx1.tri.net got flooded with about 28,000 invalid user emails, which
| > overflowed onto my qmail secondary server, mx2.tri.net.
|
| (As an aside. This re-raises the question of whether it is good
| practise to be a secondary MX for another site. I generally think it's
| a bad idea...)
At least if you do, it's very helpful if the two sites have identical
policies with regards to such things as relaying, checking envelope
sender domains and the like. And it's a lot better if the primary MX
does like qmail and accepts mail even for non-existing users, or else
the secondary MX gets saddled with creating bounce messages on behalf
of the other domain. And that is bad indeed. Been there, done that,
got the T-shirt.
- Harald
