On Thu, 08 Nov 2007 12:18:08 -0500
Ken Price <kprice@???> wrote:
> > To be a little bit more precise, you ask wheter a secondary MX located
> > offsite (!) is worth the effort. You have not asked about running
> > several MX servers on your primary site, where I consider a must-have
>
> you're right. i didn't ask that because I have a load-balanced
> cluster of mail servers at the primary location. Please see my
> original post:
> http://lists.exim.org/lurker/message/20071107.181404.35b21969.en.html
>
> > Now, about running a secondary MX offsite....
> <snip>
> > regarding the user-database) and quite expensive (hardware,
> > antispam-appliances, etc.).
>
> Yes, I'm aware of how to correctly implement an intelligent secondary
> and the costs associated with it. I'm looking for input on the
> effectiveness of a secondary MX. The first sentence from my original
> post:
>
> "In a world where most MTA's will retry a message up to 5-7 days, is a
> secondary MX worth the added maintenance and configuration headache?"
>
> >
> > Short summary:
> > no.
> > --
>
> Is that your final answer? :-)
>
> Thanks,
> -Ken
>
>
>
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Hello Ken,
This is an interesting question and really got me thinking! Here's my 2p's worth. To answer your question directly, yes. Configuring a secondary mx doesn't require lots of maintenance or configuration headaches when I set mine up and it's been reasonable to maintain for me. I agree that it's more effort than not doing that but for me, the benefits outway that. You say you've got a cluster at your main site, so it's clear you know what you're doing (more than me anyhow :)
The benefits as I see them are that it's within your control, as others have said and I have experienced problems without it. i.e. I am on several mailing lists and (before my secondary mx was setup), when I had downtime, I got unsubscribed from some of those lists. This was a pain to sort out and I did lose some emails. (Not from the excellent exim mailing list I should add :)
My servers are not for business use, so sometimes it can take days/weeks to fix a problem, plus I may not be able to afford replacement parts immediately. (Obviously I attend to security issues asap tho').
I accept your thoughts that other mail servers should handle this for you - but can you guarantee you can get your primaries back up within the timeout time for other peoples mail servers? Also - can you guarantee that the senders email server is configured correctly to attempt redelivery? I thought about it and figured that I can have longer timeout's on my queues for if I'm on holiday/in hospital etc, to give me enough time to get back and un-brake the primary.
For me, the kicker in your question is "..where most MTA's will.." and personally I don't want to lose even one email because another mail server isn't configured to do so, hence me liking my own secondary mx. Ideally I'd put my secondary in another location because having a cluster is ace but if the net is down, it's down for all of them. But that's a cost issue for me, not a tech judgement.
I hope you find my thoughts are useful; am certainly not claiming to be right; but it works for me :)
(sorry about the long-ish ramble)
Seeya!
F
--
fire <fire@???>
