Website Help, it is a hit or miss scenario all the sudden.

[Winchester]

Webmail

Dedicated IP for Webmail


We have our Windows 2003 & Exchange 2003 server in-house, so our domain is named fbclubbock.org, our host who is located in Phoenix just hosts the actual "website" part.

We are getting a hit or miss on our internal server. It either works, or goes to http://mail.fbclubbock.org/404-1.html for a reason of which I am trying desperately to figure out. Everything was working fine until a few weeks ago.

What could be causing this? The problem only occcurs remotely, when typing mail.fbclubbock.org, but works everytime without fail when I type the dedicated IP.

So what is the problem?

Should I begin to start hosting everything in-house instead of splitting it?

 

[Xtremist]

Take a look at your DNS records:

> set type=mx
> fbclubbock.org
Server: ns.isp.com
Address: xxx.xx.xx.x

fbclubbock.org MX preference = 20, mail exchanger = mail.fbclubbock.org
fbclubbock.org MX preference = 10, mail exchanger = a1linux.m13.net
fbclubbock.org MX preference = 20, mail exchanger = a2linux.m13.net
fbclubbock.org nameserver = ns1.m13.net
fbclubbock.org nameserver = dns1.m13.net
fbclubbock.org nameserver = dns2.m13.net
mail.fbclubbock.org internet address = 209.61.148.165
mail.fbclubbock.org internet address = 216.167.190.97
ns1.m13.net internet address = 209.188.4.143
dns1.m13.net internet address = 209.188.4.144
dns2.m13.net internet address = 209.188.4.145

I can see a few things that might be problems. By the way, that's what a nice little program called nslookup returns. You can run it right from a Windows command line.

1. Unless you have your ISP serving as "backup" mail servers, you REALLY need to take out (or have them remove) those extra MX records pointing to a1linux.m13.net and a2linux.m13.net. If that's not possible, you should at LEAST make sure your mail.fbclubbock.org MX record has the lowest metric. A value of 5 would work fine with your current setup. What's going to happen (and might've already) is that if a sending mail server is unable for whatever reason to talk to your mail exchange, it will attempt delivery to another one of those servers (according to the metric). You might very well have a lot of unknown email sitting on your ISP's mail server.

2. As shown above, but more clearly here:

> set type=a
> mail.fbclubbock.org
Server: ns.isp.com
Address: xxx.xx.xx.x

Non-authoritative answer:
Name: mail.fbclubbock.org
Addresses: 216.167.190.97, 209.61.148.165

You have TWO A records for your mail.fbclubbock.org host. This is a HUGE problem. What's going to happen is that SOME people are going to use the 216 address, but others will use the 209 address. That's especially bad since that's not just the address used to check your webmail, but also the address used to deliver email to in the first place! You could very likely be losing some, if not a good deal, or your email.

Seriously consider fixing these two extremely large issues before worrying about the 404 you're getting. Chances are, fixing that will fix your problem. Good luck man, it's gonna be messy 😉