>How do I get the secondary to pick up the mail when the primary is down? 

If you setup the MX records correctly, this should be done by the sending 
server. It will look at the MX records and try sending to the server with 
the lowest value, if it doesn't accept the mail, it will move up the MX 
records in order of the value until a server takes the mail (or it runs 
out of records to try).

So if setup correctly, it should basically be transparent to you.

>How do I get the clients to obtain their mail from the secondary when the 
>primary is down?

They don't. They get their mail from the primary. The secondary just acts 
as a mail relay to the primary. So when the secondary takes the mail, it 
just tries repeatedly to send the mail on to the primary with the plan 
that the primary will come back online and accept the mail before the max 
number of attempts is reached.

So while the primary is down, your clients can't check their mail. If you 
need redunancy like that, then I can't help you with setting up SIMS for 
that.


So to set it up, the first step is to assign the MX records. You would 
set your primary server with a lower value than your secondary. So the MX 
record should be something like this

primary.domain.com MX 10 ###.###.###.###
secondary.domain.com MX 30 ###.###.###.###


Then in the seconday server's router put the following

doamin.com = domain.com.smtp

And set the number of retries (in the SMTP settings) to something high 
(figure on your duration to retry * number of retries will tell you how 
long it will continue to attempt to send the mail before giving up... my 
old ISP was REALLY unreliable so I have mine set to 30 minutes between 
retries with 250 attempts before stopping, so it will retry for 125 hours 
or roughly 5 days before giving up).

-chris
<http://www.mythtech.net>


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