One last dnsreport warning to work on

[mcsolas]

Platform: w2003 server, IIS 6, MS DNS, Smartermail mail server

I have a site that I have * finally * gotten all the dns zones configured. The only place I have left with a yellow warning is when it mentions this:

Multiple MX records: WARNING: You only have 1 MX record. If your primary mail server is down or unreachable, there is a chance that mail may have troubles reaching you.

I am running my own mail server here for the first time on the first dedicated machine I have setup. There is only 1 mail server installed on its own seperate IP address ( note I have 2 more I could assign that are not used yet )

My question is how can I add a second MX record here as they mention above? Is it possible because I am only really running 1 mail server or can you configure it to have 2 mx records that point to the same mailserver?

[HarryR]

You could add another MX record pointing to another IP address that your SMTP server listens on, but thats not really the point of having multiple MX records if their all on the same machine.

The idea with multiple MX records is that if one of your mail servers is down it tries all the MX servers you have listed in a round-robin and priority mix until it can find one that it can deliver the mail to. So if one of your servers were to go down the other SMTP server would get the email and your wonderful clustering setup would mean that nobody notices the downtime apart from the admins.

One thing you could take a look at is DynDNS.org 's Backup MX service. For a fairly reasonable price they host a SMTP server that accepts email for your domain in the event that your main SMTP server is down, and when it comes back up the dyndns machine forwards all the email that was sent during the downtime gap to you.

Hope this is of some help, regards,
Harry

[mcsolas]

The DynDns.org services look very nice. Thanks for the link and info here. .. I figured it wasn't a real major thing, I was just trying to get every single bit of the dns zone perfectly configured. Having one yellow on the dns report for the domain is still doing pretty darn good