Topic: Virtual Domains and e-mail

[Tomas]

We have an e-smith box running as a POP mailserver, with webmail.
We have a number of domains registered with an ISP in the US.
We want to host the web-sites for these domains on a server in the US (due to bandwidth restrictions into and out of Ghana), but have mail delivered to our e-smith box.

I have created the appropriate MX records on our Authoritative nameservers for the domains. This works fine except that qmail on the e-smith box obviously bounces mail with the message:
"Sorry. Although I'm listed as a best-preference MX or A for that host, it isn't in my control/locals file, so I don't treat it as local. (#5.4.6)"
Which makes a lot of sense.

I can solve that problem by adding the domain to tthe virtual domain list in the e-smith-manager.
Since I am however using the same server as a caching DNS for my local users, that means they now get the e-smith box as a webserver as well, which was not what I wanted.

I'm guessing that what I need to do is NOT make a virtual domain entry on my e-smith, but instead just update the control files of qmail. Is that correct, and does anyone know which files I need to update?

[Charlie Brady]

Tomas wrote:

> I can solve that problem by adding the domain to tthe virtual
> domain list in the e-smith-manager.

Correct.

> Since I am however using the same server as a caching DNS for
> my local users, that means they now get the e-smith box as a
> webserver as well, which was not what I wanted.
>
> I'm guessing that what I need to do is NOT make a virtual
> domain entry on my e-smith, but instead just update the
> control files of qmail. Is that correct, and does anyone know
> which files I need to update?

No, it is not correct. Go to the Hostname and addresses panel,

http://www.e-smith.org/docs/manual/4.1/admin-hostnames.html

and put in the hostnames and IP addresses that you need to access the externally hosted web sites. We put that feature in for people just like you.

regards

Charlie

[Tomas]

Charlie Brady wrote:
>
> No, it is not correct. Go to the Hostname and addresses panel,
>
> http://www.e-smith.org/docs/manual/4.1/admin-hostnames.html
>
> and put in the hostnames and IP addresses that you need to
> access the externally hosted web sites. We put that feature
> in for people just like you.

That would solve my problem, it seems, if I was talking about the actual domain for the e-smith box. Unfortunately I am talking about a virtual domain.
The situation:
I have 2 domains lets call them aaa.com and bbb.com
aaa.com is the actual domain of my e-smith machine. No problems there.
bbb.com points to a hosted website at an ISP. I want mail from user@bbb.com to be delivered to my e-smith machine instead of to the ISP.

- I created an MX record for bbb.com pointing at aaa.com
- In order for qmail to not bounce the mail, I added bbb.com as a virtual domain to aaa.com

Problem: The e-smith manager seems to automatically create DNS entries for bbb.com when I add it as a virtual domain. The result is that any user that uses aaa.com as a nameserver sees aaa.com instead of bbb.com.

I'm still not quite sure what the easiest solution for that is.

Thanks

Tomas

[Luuk Jansen]

I thonk you just must do what Charlie means.
I've the almost same sort of situation.

In the e-smith manager you create a host entry (at the tab 'hostnames and adresses') to your bbb.com site.
You must know the IP-adres from the site, but I know for sure that you can find out (whois sites, or trecert in msdos prompt (windows).

You add a host entry for www.bbb.com with his IP adres.
If an user types a I-net adres e-smith first looks at the 'host entries' (or how it is named) and then looks at the DNS. So, when a person enters www.bbb.com e-smith looks at the host-enties, and finds the right IP-adres, and the problem is solved.

Good luck...

Luuk