[H-GEN] Humbug machine problems and lost email

[Robert Brockway]

[ Humbug *General* list - semi-serious discussions about Humbug and     ]
[ Unix-related topics. Posts from non-subscribed addresses will vanish. ]

On Tue, 24 Sep 2002, Greg Black wrote:

> [ Humbug *General* list - semi-serious discussions about Humbug and     ]
> [ Unix-related topics. Posts from non-subscribed addresses will vanish. ]
>
> Now that the Humbug web site seems to be back on the air and the
> mailing lists appear to be operating again, I guess we can
> presume that things are back to normal.  But what will happen to
> the mail that was sent to the Humbug email aliases while things
> were not normal?  Have those messages disappeared forever into a
> black hole or will they eventually be delivered?

It'll depend on the MX records for the domain that the mail was addressed
to.  For those with addresses of the form foobar at humbug.org.au we can look
at the MX records for humbug.org.au to determine what will occur:

rani:~>host -t mx humbug.org.au
humbug.org.au mail is handled by 50 caliburn.humbug.org.au.
humbug.org.au mail is handled by 100 mailhub1.uq.net.au.
humbug.org.au mail is handled by 100 mailhub2.uq.net.au.
humbug.org.au mail is handled by 200 postoffice.telstra.net.

With caliburn down the UQ mail servers will hold our mail.  If they were
also down (unlikely) then a mail server at Telstra will hold our mail for
72 hours.  Since the downtime was about 24 hours[1] all mail should have
found its way to its destination relatively quickly once caliburn was back
with us.

[1] Give or take 12 hours, I don't have up to date details on this.

For those with their own subdomains under humbug.org.au this will depend
on what the person wanted done with their mail.  Normally such a domain
would be configured with a particular machine owned by the club member as
the primary MX, caliburn as a secondary, and possibly others as tertiary,
etc.  Thus mail to these domains would only be a problem if the primary
mail server had an outage that was coincident with the outage for
caliburn, and even then the domain may have other mail servers to catch
the mail.  If all of this fails the sending mail server is supposed to
hold on to the mail & keep resending for a while (perhaps a couple of
days) before reporting failed delivery to the user.

So the worst case scenario (assuming all mail server are properly
configured) is that the sender will get a bounce message (could not send
message,etc).  I think it is unlikely any mail got to this stage.

Cheers,
	-Rob

-- Robert Brockway B.Sc. email: robert at timetraveller.org  ICQ: 104781119
   Linux counter project ID #16440 (http://counter.li.org)
   "The earth is but one country and mankind its citizens" -Baha'u'llah


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