Email Server / MX / Domain/ DNS Basics

Moif Murphy · External Since: Aug 07, 2007 Posts: 2

Hi all,

I'm investigating the possibility of replacing our externally Hosted
Exchange server with something inhouse. I'm a home Linux user and have a
relatively decent level of Linux knowledge but this migration attempt
has made me aware that I don't know as much as I thought I did.

I've built a Centos 5 server at work and we're running the Open Source
version of Zimbra. So far everything works great internally but I'm a
little stumped with the whole external domain, DNS and MX record thing.

We have an Active Directory server which is also our DNS server. I've
successfully (read: blindly) added the MX record to this DNS server in
order to get Zimbra to work so the next step is to test on a external
domain that we'd be using for company wide email delivery.

I presume we'll need to buy our domain name and host it here? Or can we
buy a domain name and host it elsewhere and add / adjust MX records
ourselves.

I think we'll be wanting to do everything internally so we can learn as
we go.

Any advice appreciated.

alexd · External Since: Dec 15, 2005 Posts: 39

Moif Murphy wrote:

> I presume we'll need to buy our domain name and host it here?

I'd say yes buy another domain, but get the DNS and secondary/tertiary MX
hosted elsewhere. You don't want a loss of internet connectivity resulting
in delayed or missing emails

> Or can we
> buy a domain name and host it elsewhere and add / adjust MX records
> ourselves.

Again, have separate internal and external DNS servers. You don't want a
loss of internet connection resulting in no-one being able to see your
domain.

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Moif Murphy · External Since: Aug 07, 2007 Posts: 2

alexd wrote:
> Moif Murphy wrote:
>
>> I presume we'll need to buy our domain name and host it here?
>
> I'd say yes buy another domain, but get the DNS and secondary/tertiary MX
> hosted elsewhere. You don't want a loss of internet connectivity resulting
> in delayed or missing emails
>
>> Or can we
>> buy a domain name and host it elsewhere and add / adjust MX records
>> ourselves.
>
> Again, have separate internal and external DNS servers. You don't want a
> loss of internet connection resulting in no-one being able to see your
> domain.
>

Great, thanks for the reply! I think we'll go the external route.

Greg Hennessy · External Since: Jan 24, 2005 Posts: 49

On Tue, 07 Aug 2007 12:23:38 +0100, alexd <troffasky.DeleteThis@hotmail.com> wrote:

>Moif Murphy wrote:
>
>> I presume we'll need to buy our domain name and host it here?
>
>I'd say yes buy another domain, but get the DNS and secondary/tertiary MX
>hosted elsewhere. You don't want a loss of internet connectivity resulting
>in delayed or missing emails

I would whole heartedly concur, It's just not worth the PITA to host it
locally IMHO.
--
?¡aah, los gringos otra vez!?

Robert Marshall · External Since: Jul 30, 2004 Posts: 94

On Tue, 07 Aug 2007, Moif Murphy wrote:

>
> Hi all,
>
> I'm investigating the possibility of replacing our externally Hosted
> Exchange server with something inhouse. I'm a home Linux user and
> have a relatively decent level of Linux knowledge but this migration
> attempt has made me aware that I don't know as much as I thought I
> did.
>
> I've built a Centos 5 server at work and we're running the Open
> Source version of Zimbra. So far everything works great internally
> but I'm a little stumped with the whole external domain, DNS and MX
> record thing.

We've just gone though evaluating various email servers - we're
currently using exim accessed via imap and we tried zimbra (we really
really need some sort of calendar integration with our windows users)
- the full version as an evaluation and had some pretty fundamental
difficulties with their outlook integration tool - with Outlook2007 it
doesn't work at all (one that does is coming sometime) and there were
various other roughnesses with other outlook versions. We then tried
scalix and found similar - but not quite as severe problems

In both cases the web interfaces are wonderful it is just integration
into the email tool that users are familiar with that leaves us cold -
and scratching around for something else...

> Any advice appreciated.

Not on what you asked but I hope it is useful!

Robert
--
La grenouille songe..dans son château d'eau
Links and things http://rmstar.blogspot.com/