Roderick A. Anderson wrote:
Not too clear from the subject and probably a lame idea.
Situation: We have a system (MX1) that is having hardware problems.
Currently they are irritations but we want to rebuild the system
before it really crashes. There are actually two systems so there is
back up (MX2) in case there is a failure.
We created another system (MX3) and added it to the DNS records with a
priority the same as MX2 and gave MX1 a really low priority hoping to
slowly reduce traffic to it.
It is going too slowly! So I was thinking instead of just shutting it
down it would be nice to the tell the connecting systems to go to the
other system then refuse to accept the mail. After a day or so shout
it down.
Is this possible? If so what is it called? (I'm completely at loss
here for terms to search with.)
If you don't want traffic directed to MX1, remove its MX record while
reconfiguring. Be sure to note the TTL on the DNS entries - you can
expect to see traffic as long as the DNS entries are cached by other DNS
servers. When you know in advance that you will be jiggering with DNS,
start off by reducing the TTL to a short interval (do this at least
current-TTL ahead of time, of course) so your changes will propagate
more quickly when you make them.
Cheers,
Steve
