On Wed, 2010-02-24 at 16:51 -0800, Terry Barnum wrote: > When it's time to swap servers, is there a preferred recipe to move to new > hardware while using the same domain? I googled and checked the FAQ and > archives but didn't have a whole lot of luck. >
Your domain has at least one MX record for receiving mail. Suppose it is: mydomain MX 10 1 day oldserver_ip Change it to mydomain MX 20 1 min oldserver_ip mydomain MX 10 1 min newserver_ip Enable the new servers SMTP and disable the old servers SMTP and IMAP. Wait for a few minutes to make sure that all mail on the old server is processed. Copy the IMAP mail folders to the new box. Now enable the IMAP on the new server. Change the DNS to mydomain MX 10 1 day newserver_ip (note: those 10 and 20 are priorities where mail is delivered) When you want or can reuse the IP number of the old mail box, just pull the old one from the net and give it a temporary different IP number. Now enable the "old" IP number on the new box and enable SMTP. Copy the IMAP folders from the old box to the new one and enable IMAP on the new one. You don't need to care much about a short downtime of your SMTP server. Mail is fairly robust. Mail delivery will be automatically retried when the receiving mail server appears to be down. Last one: a lot of ISPs have a so called relay mail server. If you add that one to your DNS' MX record, mail will be delivered to the relay server when your server does not respond. When your server is up again, the relay server will automatically deliver the mail to your server. Good luck! Bas.
