On Mon, Feb 20, 2017 at 11:46:41AM +0000, Simon Ransome wrote:
On 20/02/17 10:47, Laurie Brown wrote:
On 19/02/17 21:53, Chris Green wrote:
This may relate to my recent long question about loss of E-Mail.
Can anyone tell me *exactly* how an MX record for my home server zbmc.eu should be confiugured?
Currently it's configured to point to the 'root' A record for zbmc.eu, so the MX record is for zbmc.eu also:-
chris@cheddar$ host zbmc.eu zbmc.eu has address 84.92.49.234 zbmc.eu mail is handled by 10 zbmc.eu. chris@cheddar$However I *think* this may be wrong and I should create a second A record for the same IP address and point the MX record to that instead. I don't really understand why this should make any diffrerence though.
Any experts (or at least people who know more than me) here?
I define them thus:
@convergent-ict.com::mg3.convergent-ict.com:10:86400 @convergent-ict.com::mg5.convergent-ict.com:10:86400
<snip>
Hi Chris,
By way of further explanation...
The "10" in the above example is the MX Preference (it's an arbitrary number between 0 and 65535 but where 10 has become something of a rule-of-thumb). Here this means that as the two MX records have the same preference, any incoming connections should (in theory) load-balance between the two servers, mg3 and mg5. However, in the case of your original configuration, where it sounds like there is only one host, there would be no point creating a second A or MX record as it would be pointing to the same server anyway.
Another common example is to set up your own host with an MX Pref of 10 and an ISP host with a higher number, say 100 - this routes mail mostly to your own server but gives it a backup route to your ISP if yours is unavailable.
I did basically understand most of this. Though adding a lower priority alternative is something I might add so that turning my system off for a while won't hurt (though of course senders should in theory back off and try again).
No on seems to have quite understood my original query though - is it OK for the mail server to point directly at the main/root host?