Setup Exchange Server 2007 for Friend - Some Questions

[Zoom7000]

I’m doing a private job for a friend. Finally after setting up his server and domain and everything else that runs his business, he is agreeing to pay me to install and setup an Exchange Server (2007).

Basically, he has a domain name setup with some dodgy Indian company. (He had some Indian tech doing his tech support before!) So, I’m in the process of getting that changed, possibly to 123 Reg.

Basically, there are a few questions that I wanted to ask:

We will assume that in this case the domain name is “company.com”. If I was to create the MX record for the domain to point to mail.company.com what methods can I use to ensure that mail is held in an alternate area just in case the mail server was to go down or there was a loss in Internet connection? Can this only be done if the DNS provider allows or are there services available to hold emails until the server or connection was restored?

The Internet connection is going to be provided by Be*. I assume that we will need 2 static IP addresses for this. In this case the Be Thomson router has to be put into bridged mode and will therefore not provide wireless services. Can I get around this by connecting a wireless access point?

With regards to the above point, is it necessary to have 2 IP addresses? Will it work with just the one? Basically the Thomson router is connected to the domain controller and the domain controller provides addresses by DHCP. Is there any way I can get the mail.company.com address to point to the internal address for the mail server?

[srochford]

RFC 2821 specifies that "Retries continue until the message is transmitted or the sender gives up; the give-up time generally needs to be at least 4-5 days." This means that anyone sending you email will retry for several days (so this covers things like weekend outages)

You can't publish (eg) 192.168.2.10 as an MX address - no router in the world will know how to get there - but you should be able to publish the IP address of your router and then tell it that anything connecting on port 25 should forward to 192.168.2.10

[Zoom7000]

RFC 2821 specifies that "Retries continue until the message is transmitted or the sender gives up; the give-up time generally needs to be at least 4-5 days." This means that anyone sending you email will retry for several days (so this covers things like weekend outages)

That's good to know, so perhaps I won't need to worry about an additional MX record.

You can't publish (eg) 192.168.2.10 as an MX address - no router in the world will know how to get there - but you should be able to publish the IP address of your router and then tell it that anything connecting on port 25 should forward to 192.168.2.10

lol, I hope I didn't sound that thick! I wasn't sure port forwarding was enough. I just wanted to know whether I need a separate external IP address for the mail server.

[srochford]

If you don't know the answer then the question isn't thick - and it's way better that you ask the question than just blunder into something :-)

The time you do need more than 1 IP address is if you want more than 1 mail server. If you have multiple web servers then you can have 1 IP address and different ports and you just tell people to use the correct port (because you publish a link to it with the port). You can't do this with SMTP because incoming mail always connects to port 25.

For example, we have cnwl.ac.uk and student.cnwl.ac.uk domains - these are handled by different boxes and they have different IPs (actually, the first one is now handled externally for spam filtering but it used not to be like that :-))