On Wed, Jun 24, 1998 at 09:12:01AM +0100, Philip Hazel wrote:
> On Tue, 23 Jun 1998, Jochen Topf wrote:
>
> > Ok. The problem is that I was speaking about an option to be used in the
> > config of the smarthost, while you are talking about an option to be used
> > in the config on mx.mydomain.de.
>
> Ah! Light dawns. Sorry. I completely misunderstood. I now see what you
> are getting at. So what you have is
>
> domain MX 1 primary
> domain MX 2 secondary
>
> where "secondary" is configured to send all non-local mail to
> "smarthost". You don't know how many domains are in this situation, and
> (I presume) you are unable to get the DNS changed to
>
> domain MX 1 primary
> domain MX 2 smarthost
>
> which would be the "proper" way of fixing the problem. (An alternative
> would be to turn off relaying on "secondary", but that would bounce
> mail.)
>
> So you want a way of configuring "smarthost" to get around this
> mis-configuration of the DNS. (I just want to make the point that there
> would be no problem if the DNS could be updated to describe what the
> actual situation is.)
Jepp. Exactly that is the situation. Whether the DNS is mis-configured is
debatable. The reason for this strange configuration is the following:
I am running a fairly large mail system with several mail servers with
different jobs: Getting incoming mail and "sorting" it, storing in mailboxes,
fax gateways, list servers and so on. From an outside view all these mail
servers should look like one big maschine. I put the different jobs on
different machines for easy configuration and good scalability. I only have
to machines which accept mail from outside my system (two machines for
reliability reasons), they have spam-filters and such. Its much easier to
have only those machines with access from outside and not give "the internet"
the ability to reach my smarthost directly.
> If you were able to configure "smarthost" never to send any mail to
> "secondary" it would solve this problem, but perhaps there is legitimate
> mail that needs to take that route. You are suggesting a list of hosts
> which get treated "as the local host" if they appear in MX records - but
> what happens if such a host appears as the primary MX record? Do you
> still want it removed? That would lead to the "self" option being
> invoked.
That seems to be a reasonable way to do it.
jochen
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