Hi,
This is slightly OT, but I thought you guys are as likely know about this as
anybody else. Over the last few weeks, a lot of mail intended for remote
delivery has been spending a large amount of time sat on the queue. At
first, I thought this was a local error, perhaps DNS servers being cludgy on
the MX lookup, etc. but then I started to look into it more.
Increasingly, more and more large ISPs (e.g. Pipex) are pointing MXs
directly to intermittently connected hosts. I have at least 4 corporate
customers who are moving over to us from these ISPs and when mail is being
sent out to them, it can take up to *3*days* for the mail to be delivered
(if it ever gets delivered). If their ISDN router isn't up when exim is
doing a -q, the mail is not delivered. Have any of you guys noticed this,
and is this an error on my part, or am I right in thinking that putting a
priority 1 MX to an intermittently connected host is just stupid?
Also, I don't know how many of you guys are at ISPs where you're
transferring domains around a lot, but at what point did everybody decide
that DNS servers don't really cache MX records? Once a domain has been
transferred out, it can take up to a week for all the caching servers around
the world to pick up the new MX records for the new ISP, so why do so many
ISPs seem to just do the transfer and then instantaneously cut the account
off leaving the customer with intermmitent / non-existent mail for up to a
week?
Sorry if this seems a bit of a winge, but I am seeking confirmation that it
isn't just me going mad. The scary bit is that I was once told that mad
people don't really think of themselves as mad - they think the rest of the
world is. :-)
Seriously though, either I'm more inexperienced than I thought, or the
quality of admins out there is pretty bad. It's got to the point where I've
even considered writing a "best practise" manual for other admins to make my
job easier. But then it's me who is probably wrong. :-)
--
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| Paul Robinson - Technical Director @ Akitanet - http://www.akita.co.uk |
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| T:+44 (0) 161 228 6388 F:+44 (0) 161 228 6389 E: paul@??? |
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