When the NYC disaster took out the route to my box, whisper.qrpff.net, I
asked my friend on the west coast to setup his machine, zlotnik.oilcan.org,
as a backup mx for qrpff.net. The problem: Mail kept bouncing with messages
stating that there were too many hops. zlotnik's syslog clearly indicated
that qmail was delivering mail to itself, which is obviously a dumb thing
to do. The thing was, I was fairly certain that qmail was guarded against
that. It wasn't until just now that I figured out the problem.
backup mx for qrpff.net: 65.85.11.85
zlotnik.oilcan.org ip: 192.168.1.105
Zlotnik's IP address is really a private one, because it's located behind a
NAT firewall. 65.85.11.85 traffic is routed to it.
Thus, when qmail-send sees that the primary mx is down, and 65.85.11.85 a
2ndary mx, it routes
the e-mail to 65.85.11.85, which is routed to (what else?) itself by the frw.
I'm not familiar enough with qmail or patching in general to trust myself
to make a decent patch for qmail, so what I'm thinking of is something
along the lines
/var/qmail/control/ipequiv:
65.85.11.85:192.168.1.105
i.e. packets for 65.85.11.85 will end up going to 192.168.1.105.
Questions? Comments? Money?
--
Stevie-O
Real programmers use COPY CON PROGRAM.EXE
