Moving Mail Server to another location / IP address?

[Ashley Aitken]

Howdy All,

I need to move a machine running MacOSX Server 10.4.8, particularly  
mail services but also some Web sites to another location and IP  
address.

My understanding is that Internet mail uses a store-and-forward model  
that attempts for 4 hours (or so) to deliver an email.  So I am  
hoping I have four hours to move the machine.

I guess I have to:

1.  Change the IP address of the machine
2.  Change the DNS MX record for the mail server

and, of course, physically move the machine (at which time I might  
also add a new larger drive to the machine and copy the original  
drive onto it with Disk Utility).

I believe there is a process and command for changing the IP address  
of a MacOSX Server installation.  Will that be adequate?

I don't have a second email server (that is recommended, I believe,  
for such situations).  I realise people won't be able to access their  
email during the outage but will we lose any email sent to us?

Further, is there a particular order I should do all this:

1.  Take machine off network at old location
2.  Change the DNS MX record to the new IP address (allowing time for  
caches to timeout)
3.  Copy OS & data on old drive to new drive
4.  Boot (off network) and change IP address on OS on new drive
5.  Put machine back on network at new location.

This is not a critical email server used by important people, but it  
is our family and small business email server, so I don't want to  
stuff things up.

Finally, I would normally do a backup of the server before doing such  
a change.  I believe copying the old drive to a new drive is doing  
that (i.e. I could go back to the previous situation quite easily).

Thanks for any suggestions, corrections, experience.

Cheers,
Ashley.


--
Ashley Aitken
Perth, Western Australia
mrhatken at mac dot com
Skype Name: MrHatken (GMT + 8 Hours!)