Greetings all, and first let me say congratulations to all those
involved in the Debian project in general, and specifically I'd like to
thank those responsible for doing such a versatile and powerful
packaging job with Exim4. Sarge is my first experience with
Debian on one of my servers, and as they say - "it just keeps getting
better". I cut my teeth on RH 7.0 and ran it through 9, but after
being left "high and dry" decided not to go down the Fedora road.
Necessity dictates a major server overhaul, and Debian's won both my
respect and admiration due to it's structure, capabilities, and
community. <br>
<br>
Now for the task at hand: our main mail server is located in our
public offices, however we've recently signed a colocation agreement
with a provider about 3 hours from our location. All of our other
systems (Web hosting & SQL, DSL provisioning equipment, etc) has
been relocated (with the exception of DNS), however now we find it's
time to move the mail server. Since it's a physical move, we
can't avoid turning off the power for 2 or three hours to server which
is the lowest numbered MX record for all of our domains, plus the
domains we host. Obviously this is something that can be a little
distressing.<br>
<br>
My plan has been to create a secondary server, which will temporarily
take over the primarys server's name in DNS. It's that new server
which has been configured with Sarge's exim4 distribution. I
intend to set that server to "queue_only" while the second server is
being transported & installed in the co-lo. Once it's been
brought up on the new IP range, I intend to change DNS once again for
both our internal & hosted domains, so that our primary MX record
is the (now) colocated server, and change my backup server's DNS to be
the MX 20 of those domains. From what I can gather, once I
initiate a queue runner process on the backup server, it will treat all
queued "internal" mail just like all the other mail - i.e. using
remote_smtp. My question is two-fold:<br>
<br>
1) Does this like a reasonable solution, to those more
experienced with Exim? About the only other conclusion I could
come up with was to allow the backup server to deliver mail normally -
local addresses to mbox spools & remote_smtp for everything
else. Than just append the contents of each old mbox spool from
the backup server to the user's spool on the new server.<br>
<br>
2) Considering that regardless of the configuration solution I
use to achieve this, I'll be keeping this server with a function Exim4,
what's the recommended method of creating the (extensive) macro file
I'll need? My best plan for that so far was to go through each of
the conf.d/ files with a yellow notepad and a pen, make a note of the
dc_ variables and the values I intend to change them to. Is this
about what everyone does?<br>
<br>
Thanks much for taking the time to read (and hopefully reply) to this,
and again special thanks to the maintainers of the exim4 package.
No matter what, I'm with this "for the long haul" :)<br>
<br>
Josh<br>