Topic: Primary Domain Name confusion

[Ness]

Hi - I hope you can help with this - apologies in advance for level of detail..

I have taken on support of a Mitel 6000 (6.0.1) server installed by a UK Mitel reseller. Mitel 6000 is SME Server 6.0.1 with support from Mitel's AMC for key aspects of management. The reseller has gone out of business and stopped supporting the product and has asked me to carry on from where he left off. Thing is, its a bit of a dog's dinner....

I have a history from the reseller's reports about what they had done over the last 4 years... here's my view, in bullet form, and you might find the network diagram attached helpful.

http://www.tapiochre.co.uk/bdimages/dnsprob.png

- The server was installed in 2002, in Server/Gateway mode.

- The server primary domain was configured as (for the purpose of this example) "xzy.com"

- The Mitel AMC was not and is still not publishing the xyz.com domain, this was being done by Demon Internet in the UK.

- Customer has a single, BT allocated fixed IP address (let's call it 200.200.200.200 for this example) on the ADSL
  router's WAN port.

- The server's external LAN IP is set up in the router config as a "DMZ" IP address, so all traffic for the server
  is passed straight through the router to the server. (Works fine)

- Until 2 weeks ago week, the ISP DNS records pointed the xzy.com doamin to an external address of (example) 100.100.100.100
  (this IP was on their own webspace)

- The website (www.xyz.com) was hosted at that same IP address of 100.100.100.100

- The ISP MX record pointed email for xyz.com to 200.200.200.200 for mail delivery staright to the server.

[So, at this stage, mail for xzy.com was arriving at the server properly and web access was routing to the
web service at the ISP location 100.100.100.100.]

[The downside was that if the customer needed to visit www.xyz.com , then the browser would land on the server's primary webpage (which was unpopulated so they saw "Information Bay: This information bay has not yet been customized."]

[To get to their website from the server's LAN side, they had to either browse to 100.100.100.100 or they set up the
"hosts" file on their PCs to have an entry to force requests to www.xyz.com to that IP address.]

- Three weeks ago, thay had a new website built and moved it from 100.100.100.100 to a new hosting place on a new IP of   (example) 90.90.90.90.

- DNS records were updated and the website became visible in 24 hours for public viewing.

- The MX record was unchanged so email would continue to route to 200.200.200.200.

[This still meant that in-house users had to browse to 90.90.90.90 to see their own website or edit the hosts file]

- Reseller reconfigured the server primary domain name to "abc.com", so that requests from local LAN users out to "xyz.com" would pass from the
  server out to the public internet. This worked ok after the reboot.

- Within a few hours of the domain name change, reports were arriving that emails entering the serverwere being bounced back
  with the following error message:

"Hi. This is the qmail-send program at [thesendingemailserver.co.uk]
I'm afraid I wasn't able to deliver your message to the following addresses.
This is a permanent error; I've given up. Sorry it didn't work out.

<goodusername@xyz.com>:
200.200.200.200 does not like recipient.
Remote host said: 553 Sorry, that domain isn't in my list of allowed rcpthosts.
Giving up on 200.200.200.200."

- The reseller set the primary domain in the server back to xyz.com and the email bounces stopped.

- Reseller stops supporting the customer when they went out of business.

- I was contacted to see if I could help.



So there you have the potted history.

I'm not sure what is going on here - I'm clearly missing something!! I have read other mails about Error 553 and see reference to "relaying", but am not sure what I ought to do to configure this properly. I also can't seem to find any clear guidelines in the manual about this type of configuration (which cannot be a rare - surely?)

I'd rather not go messing around with the server config until I know exactly why why email for user@xyz.com is bounced if the primary domain is abc.com, even though the ISP MX record points all mail for xyz.com points to the 200.200.200.200 IP address. (Like I say - I need advice and help here!!)

Sorry if this is long winded, but I needed to give as much info as I could to get the best help from you guys.

Look forward to you help soon.

Chris

[djhomeless]

I may be confused what your issue is, but you've got two distinct problems:

1. When forwarding a particular record, the server bounces the mail.
2. User on the same lan has to input IP instead of hostname.

On the first one, if you want the server to answer to email for a particular host, you've got to have a record of that host on the box. The MX record is simply telling the mail where to go. But once the mail gets there, the mail will bounce if the server has no record of the host.

What you should do is keep the hostname setup in the SME, then select 'Hostnames and Addresses' under the configuration tab. There you can chose to redirect www .whatever.com to point to a particular external IP.

Considering your 'A' record doesn't point to this box, it should have no affect externally. But it should allow internal LAN users to stop having to input the IP manually.

Geoffrey

[Ness]

djhomeless

What you should do is keep the hostname setup in the SME, then select 'Hostnames and Addresses' under the configuration tab. There you can chose to redirect www .whatever.com to point to a particular external IP.

Ah! I didn't even think of that!

I bet it works first time, so I'll set it up today and test it out.

Thx

Chris

[kruhm]

FYI -when forwarding the site to an external IP, i've had to shutdown the sme for 10 minutes or so before the changes would pick up.

[Ness]

Done those changes as suggested.

I was a bit puzzled by the Hostnames and Addresses table that I saw as a result:

www.themodifieddomainname.com Global Remote new.IP.Add.Here new.IP.Add.Here   Modify  Remove

As I set this to be a remote IP address, I have to put an IP in both fields of the config form, but the results show that the IP I entered is in both the Local and Remote IP fields.... Is this right?

Won't be able to shutdown until early Monday UK time but will try to feed back any 'odd' results.

Thanks for all of your help

Chris

[dmac]

Ness,

In your original post you stated,

Reseller reconfigured the server primary domain name to "abc.com", so that requests from local LAN users out to "xyz.com" would pass from the
server out to the public internet. This worked ok after the reboot.

This will block all mail for the "xyz.com" domain, since the server is now "abc.com", and then,

The reseller set the primary domain in the server back to xyz.com and the email bounces stopped.

This is the expected behaviour as the 'xyz.com' domain does not exist on your server when setup as 'abc.com'.

in the Server-manager panel access the 'Hostname and Address' panel.  Here you can redirect your www to the external address by changing the properties for your www server.  Click on the modify link and then change the 'location' field to 'remote' and in the next panel add the ip address of your hosting server.

Regards,

Darin MacLachlan

[Ness]

Thanks Darin!

In fact thanks to all who helped here.

Good news, (but you probably expected nothing less) is that the system is now running like a Rolls Royce and the customer is delighted!

Mail coming in and users going out! Cool.

Very best regards

Chris