Mail Server Fallback?

ChojinDSL · l33t Joined: 07 Jul 2003 Posts: 784

I manage three different servers for my employer.
All our servers are hosted via a dedicated hosting provider.

The other day they had a power outage and a whole bunch of servers (including ours) were down. One of the servers I manage is a mail server for our clients, which hosts quite a number of domains. That kinda got me thinking.

Is there a way to make a backup mail server?

So basically, if our mail server goes down for whatever reason, the mails should get processed by a backup server.
Question is, what happens when the primary mail server comes back online again, are the users able to retrieve the emails which were sent to the secondary server?

Anybody know of a good howto on how to accomplish something like that?

msalerno · Posted: Thu Oct 12, 2006 4:23 pm Post subject:

You can do it with DNS MX records. The problem is sync'ing the servers so when one comes back online the transition is seamless. Search for redundant mailservers.

Possible Solutions:
A rsync'd backend where the mailboxes are stored.
DBmail, all mail is stored in a mysql database. Setup database replication. No filesystem sync to worry about.

Good luck.

flashedcoder · n00b Joined: 12 Oct 2006 Posts: 3

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magic919 · Posted: Fri Oct 13, 2006 8:00 am Post subject:

For short outages don't bother. SMTP protocol means the other mail servers will try again later and hold it in their queue meanwhile.

If you are going to do backup MX are you planning to point your users to the new server to collect email too? If not then just set up a conventional backup MX and the server will hold the email until your main is back online. Then it'll send it over.