Although external email has been covered in older posts, my scenario sounds different than others perhaps because I’m approaching this ass-backwards.
I’m unclear about how to use an external mail system while hosting a Siteworx user’s web site. DNS is where I’m confused because I’m using Enom’s 5 name servers for this domain instead of DNS on the Nodeworx server. I’ve done this before with Google Apps and it was simple enough using a DNS zone in Nodeworx that got everything working. But in this case I’m going for NS and MX redundancy I can’t offer with a single VPS that has only one IP address. In order to use Enom’s redundant host and MX entries at all, name servers need to be Enom’s.
The user’s domain is using Enom’s NS with a pair of MX records and the external mail is working fine with the CNAME alias for ‘mail.’ I tested an A record for ‘www’ pointing to the Nodeworx server’s IP which gets me to the main server but not the Siteworx user’s web space. Aside from creating the Siteworx account and disabling local mail, what step am I getting wrong if I’m married to Enom’s DNS? Do I need a zone in Nodeworx for this user with Enom’s name servers? It’s my thinking that Enom’s name servers negate DNS zones in Nodeworx for this domain.
Suggestions are appreciated even if it means scrapping what I’ve done to this point.
Sorry, that sounds complicated but is not really, I don’t think.
All you need to do, is set a siteworx account up on domain, the NS do not matter and can be left with the IW-CP default NS. The DNS settings that matter, are MX and A and or Cname settings.
Your MX records are correct, if I understand correctly, but your issue is Cname www, but you have to remember, these records are given by Enom, which means first they must exist at Enom, and secondly, the exact matching records must be present in the DNS zone in your IW siteworx DNS. ie. Enome A mydomain.url 111.222.333.444 Cname www mydomain.url Siteworx DNS A mydomain.url 111.222.333.444 Cname www mydomain.url
This then should work as expected
Also, just for clarity, as most do not realise, even with multi DNS servers, if your hosting server goes offline, the wesbite stops, as most donot have multiwebsite failover (usually not big enough to pay these costs), so normally, it is usual to only set MX for failover by this method, but again, most mail systems can be repaired within time frames of queue reries (if not running clustered), so to me, the above is not needed, but this is my thoughts only, and RFC dissagree, as will some users, which I accept, but when was the last time systems failed, and in what period.
Many thanks
John
MX failover is really what I was after. Then it occurred to me the pair of MX records for the external mail provider take care of that no matter where DNS is hosted. Duhh.
And like you said, when is the last time I really needed any kind of DNS failover? Once in a period of years in my case, and no mail was lost.
The part that wasn’t making sense to me is how NS fundamentally operates. You’ve cleared that up for me: I wasn’t sure if MX and other records hosted at a registrar can be duplicated on a different server for any effect. i.e., I thought the entire zone on my Nodeworx server would be bypassed by the lookup process if the Nodeworx server wasn’t hosting NS for that domain.
I ended up using my private NS on the VPS, copied the records, and within 3 minutes the user’s site came to life.