Moving Mail Server to another location / IP address?

[Ken Anderson]

Ashley,

It can take 48 hours for DNS to fully propagate.  Normally, mail  
servers will hold outbound mail for 3 days, but there's no  
guarantee.  If I were you, I'd contract another company to be a  
backup mailhost with a backup MX record.  I use dyndns for backup MX  
- it's really inexpensive, and I think worth it.

Ken

On Feb 8, 2007, at 8:40 PM, Ashley Aitken wrote:

>
> 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!)
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> MacOSX-admin mailing list
> MacOSX-admin at omnigroup.com
> http://www.omnigroup.com/mailman/listinfo/macosx-admin