Subject: Re: Setting up mail server
From: James Bagley Jr. (james@thelostnet.net)
Date: Tue Dec 25 2001 - 00:01:02 AKST
Justin,
Just looking at the whois dabatase for enderakonline.com:
Domain Name: ENDERAKONLINE.COM
Administrative Contact, Billing Contact:
Dieters, Justin (JD26517) enderak@gci.net
5431 Camelot Dr.
Anchorage, AK 99508
US
907-929-4937
Technical Contact:
GCI Domain Administrator (GDA5-ORG) dnsadmin@GCI.NET
GCI
2550 Denali St.
Anchorage, AK 99503
US
907 868-0100
Fax- 907 868-632
Record last updated on 27-Jul-2001.
Record expires on 27-Jul-2003.
Record created on 27-Jul-2001.
Database last updated on 24-Dec-2001 16:35:00 EST.
Domain servers in listed order:
ILIAMNA.GCI.NET 208.138.130.16
SPURR.GCI.NET 206.96.62.16
And running a few dns queries:
$ nslookup
Default Server: diogenes.private.lan
Address: 10.0.0.1
> server iliamna.gci.net
Default Server: iliamna.gci.net
Address: 208.138.130.16
> ls -t mx enderakonline.com
[iliamna.gci.net]
$ORIGIN enderakonline.com.
@ 1D IN MX 10 mail
> mail.enderakonline.com
Server: iliamna.gci.net
Address: 208.138.130.16
Name: mail.enderakonline.com
Address: 24.237.3.124
> exit
This tells me that all of the right info is in the dns database to set
*your* box as the mail exchanger (the MX record) for your domain. Looks
like the GCI dnsadmin did it mostly right. Your reverse lookup doesn't
match your domain name, This isn't terribly important as long as you
understand it.
All you really need to do is setup a mail exchanger on your system. I
recomend postfix (http://www.postfix.org/), but many packages are
available. From there you can add as many email addresses as you like (I
have like 14 or so addresses aliased to my address).
One problem you may run into with two ways to solve it. Some mail
exchangers won't accept mail from systems who's reverse does not match
their forward. Your mail server has to advertise a hostname, if 'nslookup
<your_ip_address>' does not match the advertised hostname the remote
system could close the connection. You can either set the hostname to
cable-blah-blah-anchorageak.net in the mail exchanger config file (main.cf
in postfix), or you can set a 'relayhost = mta-1.gci.net' to let GCI's
mail server deal with sending mail for you. Getting GCI to change the
reverse mapping is another, remote?, possibility.
That was probably longer than it needed to be. Oh well...
Happy Holidays,
James
On Mon, 24 Dec 2001, Justin Dieters wrote:
>
> Heya all. Hopefully someone out there can get my pointed in the right
> direction here. I have a webserver set up and running with a cable
> modem from GCI and a static ip linked to the server. I have
> www.enderakonline.com registered and the dns set up and all that happy
> stuff. I was wanting to set up an e-mail server such that I would be
> able to set up my own e-mail accounts like enderak@enderakonline.com,
> admin@enderakonline.com, and whatnot.
>
> My question is: what do I need to do to set this up? Both on the
> software side - what do I need to be running, and I think there might be
> something I need to set up with my isp to get email directed through to
> my server.
>
> Thanks,
> Justin Dieters
> enderak@yahoo.com
>
>
>
> _________________________________________________________
> Do You Yahoo!?
> Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com
>
>
>
>
-- Don't panic.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2a23 : Tue Dec 25 2001 - 23:12:43 AKST