Topic: Accessing a remote site

[dave_d]

I would welcome a bit of advice here!

I've just upgraded a client from using 5.1.2 to 6.0.1-01.  Having done the update I've got a bit of a domain/hostname addressing problem.  To explain ....

In order to access emails properly having downloaded them from a multidrop mailbox it was necessary to define locally a virtual domain of the same name as the domain at the ISP's site that the emails were being delivered to.  In other words if mails sent to dd@a.co.uk were received and held in a multidrop mailbox by an ISP then it was necessary to define the same domain name (a.co.uk) on the SME server to ensure that the mails didn't get bounced once fetched from the multidrop box.

The client also had a web site at the same ISP.  Thus anyone from anywhere EXCEPT on the network serviced by the SME server could see www.a.co.uk.  Those in the local network could only see the local www.a.co.uk and got the contents of the Primary site.  This is as expected.

Now ....  in version 5.1.2 of SME server it was necessary only to define explicitly in the global field of the hostname definition the address of the external provider of www.a.co.uk and lo! - the local people could see the global web pages.

This doesn't appear to be the case for the latest version.  Instead it appears that the SME server is trying to provide the Global IP address to the external world rather than using the defined Global IP as the correct destination of the request to www.a.co.uk.

Am I missing a trick here somewhere?  How can I ensure that my local users see an EXTERNAL page when referring to www.a.co.uk rather than the LOCAL page? - and at the same time ensure that emails are processed correctly?

I hope that all makes sense!!!

In anticipation ...... an hoping that I've just mis-interpreted something somewhere ....

Dave

[Mumm-Ra]

Dave,
If I followed you query correctly all you have to do to make the local users see the externally hosted website on www.a.co.uk would be to change the www hostname on the Hostnames and addresses panel in server-manager.
Find the www hostname that you want to change and click the related modify link.
Change the location to remote and click the next button.
Enter your ISP's ip address where the site is hosted and follow though until you see the save button.
Save this info and your users should now be able to browse the externally hosted site

[dave_d]

Mmmmm....  that's what I thought - and that's what I did on the 5.1.2 system.  However, it doesn't seem to work on the 6.0.1-01 system.  I must confess to being confused.  Perhaps a reboot is needed - or maybe I nedd to issue some sort of signal-event.  Any ideas?

Dave

[dave_d]

Just thought I'd bring this to the top one last time in the hope that someone can enlighten me!!

Regards,

Dave

[kruhm]

As for the domain name Mumm-Ra is right.

If I understand correctly, going to www.domain.com goes internal instead of external because the SME is your dns.

Change www.domain.com in Hostnames and addresses and modify it to point externally.

Beware of 3 things
1 -this works for www.domain.com but not domain.com (there is a difference).
2 -this will not happen instantly. You'll have to either refresh the dns cache or the squid cache to get it working (i can't figure out which one is the culprit but i'm pretty sure it's the dns, tested by pinging). This usually happens within 24 hours. For a faster response and because i'm not an expert at this yet, I just shut my server down for about 10 minutes. When it comes back online, it works.
3 -either change your MX record for your domain name to point to your sme box or use fetchmail to process all the mail locally.

In any case, you may be going about the problem the wrong way as I see no reason why fetchmail wouldn't work. The only reason why mails would be bounced is because your server's mail blocking doesn't accept messages from whateverdomain.com to mail.yourdomain.com.

You don't have to add a subdomain but you have to add an entry:
to accept
from *.* (basically all your emails since each individual email will be listed differently)
to user@mail.yourdomain.com (your specific local account)

Your email blocking doesn't recognize user@mail.yourdomain.com (or your postmaster@mail.yourdomain.com) as a valid local account and blocks all email to them.

Hope this helps.

Thxs,
dak

[dave_d]

Thanks for the information.  I'll do some testing on a non-production box.  It looks as though impatience may have been the first problem, and a lack of understanding about fetchmail the second.

It'll be a couple of days before I can do the testing - I'll leave a note when I'm done to help enlighten those that later come to the same problems.

Thanks all.

Dave