Secondary server during power outage

scratch01 · Post by **scratch01** » Wed May 21, 2008 11:54 am

Is there a guide on where I may be able to set up an offsite secondary mail queue so that all mail can be held there until the main mail server comes back online?
I may be wrong on this, but don't most mail servers continue to try to send mail for 72 hours if a server is unreachable?
Thanks!

mcesari · Post by **mcesari** » Wed May 21, 2008 2:00 pm

Yeah if you are going to be down for less than three days you should still get most of your mail.

phoenix · Post by **phoenix** » Wed May 21, 2008 2:25 pm

[quote user="scratch01"]I may be wrong on this, but don't most mail servers continue to try to send mail for 72 hours if a server is unreachable?[/QUOTE]You could take the easier route and move your DNS to a hosted service that provides a mail back-up in addition to the DNS. I use Easy DNS and their system will try and deliver the mail for up to 5 days. When your server is back up the mail gets delivered and if not it gets bounced. The DNS service is chargeable (it's inexpensive and the mail backup is part of the service) and there are other providers for this type of service if you do a web search.

brained · Post by **brained** » Wed May 21, 2008 4:52 pm

Seconded.
I've used that feature of easyDNS and it works well.

scratch01 · Post by **scratch01** » Fri May 23, 2008 9:04 pm

Thank you all very much for your help.
I have decided to transfer my domains to EasyDNS as of this evening and the process has just started.
How can I enable this email retention service? If there is a FAQ on their site about it, I am missing it.

phoenix · Post by **phoenix** » Sat May 24, 2008 12:59 am

[quote user="scratch01"]How can I enable this email retention service? If there is a FAQ on their site about it, I am missing it.[/QUOTE]I can't remember if it's automatically done for you but check the FAQ details on Backup MX records. You just need to add their mail server MX record with a higher numerical value than the one for your zimbra server.

scratch01 · Post by **scratch01** » Thu May 29, 2008 4:39 pm

Got it to work. Thank you!
ETRN seems to be the service we are looking for. It's going to get a pretty good test this weekend as our servers will be down.
Now I have another question for you guys. I tried looking around for info on this but can't seem to make heads or tails of the help based on the info I got.
Here is my scenario, and mind you I have been hacking away at this for weeks now without an answer in sight.
1 IP for our HQ.

1 domain name.

Domain name points to company website (www) and has wildcards forwarding to the website.

Subdomains are set up with most of them pointing to remote offices and their WAN IP's.

Subdomains are also set up to point to the 1 IP at the HQ. They all resolve to the Zimbra Mail server. So obviously I have port 80 forwarded to the mail server.
Now I would like to do the following, set up virtual hosts for all the subdomains to point to specific servers behind the single IP set up at HQ.
For example:

mail.company.com --> mail server

wiki.company.com --> wiki server (this is on a different server with its own private IP)
I have tried IP and name based virtual hosting on the wiki and zimbra mail server with no luck

Is there any way to do what I am trying to accomplish and maybe a guide that can point me in the right direction?

Thanks again!