ideas on keeping e-mails uninterrupted durring move.

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scottatwittenberg

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i am working for a company, and we will be moving to a new building in the coming months..

right now we have an exchange server hosted here with all of our e-mails coming into it.

i have a few ideas on what to do..

plan 1, get a new server in the new building, set it up.. change DNS to point to new mailserver, all new mail goes there.. (i do not know yet what the ramifications of moving the old mail over would be.)

plan 2, set up e-mail accounts for everyone on the web hosts e-mail.. have it go there, and then divert it back to the server when it is set up in the new building.

plan 3, shut down old server, drive it to new building and set it up and hope that too many e-mails don't fall into a black hole in those few hours..

also, how does it work in the DNS settings if you have say mail2.companydomain.com ? does that mean that if mail.companydomain.com is down, it will just go to mail2 ? is that the same for www and www2, etc??
 
I'm in favor of option 1 with 2. It doesn't seem you can have any interruptions with e-mail, so option 1, but you need the newer mail to also go to the "old" server, option 2. I would recommend having them both online and have the employees delete any mail they already received.

I believe it takes between 24-48 hours for the DNS to be syncronized.
 
Keep in mind that any legitimate email servers will retry sending mail on a set schedule over the course of a 24 - 48 hours. So chances are that any email that WOULD get lost during a move is only SPAM that's blasted out one time with out any retry.

I'd use Plan 3, but with a change...
Will the new location have the same IP address(es)? If so then you should be fine. Otherwise make sure that you have DNS Zone control either directly or via your service provider so you can make any possible changes if need be. i.e. updating the IP of mail.yourcompany.com on the fly.
 
how far away are you talking about driving to the new office?

most email servers follow the RFC, and will continue to retry to send the email for *at least* 4 hours, some will try for 2-3 days. if your new site has a basically functional network (ie, router, DNS, everything is already set up when you roll the server in), it shouldnt skip a beat. working DNS will be very important, or may mails could be rejected once the sending server actually gets a change to make the delivery.

this of course is also based on the assumption that you have good backups, and perhaps even a seperate server ready to builtout incase you drop the thing getting in the doorway.

if i were in your shoes, and i had 1 server to work with, i would do it like this:

1) at least a week in advance, set up the new site. get the router on line, get the DNS server online. use a laptop to test the new internet connections functionality. predetermine what the email servers new ip address will be, and configure the router to forward port 25, or whatever your method of delivering email is to the new ip.

2) same time frame, adjust the public DNS information to specify a new MX record against the new routers outside ip at the new site. your domain now has 2 MX records, even tho one of them is dormant at this moment.

3) on the day of your move, stop the services on your email server. add the new ip as a second ip, change the default gateway to the new routers inside ip, add the new DNS server from the new site as the preferred lookup, power down.

4) pack, transport. plug the server in, it should boot up with its new ip configuration, and immediatly start servicing request that are following to the secondary MX record.

5) remove the original MX record from the public DNS, the new site is now the single MX.
 
Sharaz Jek said:
how far away are you talking about driving to the new office?

most email servers follow the RFC, and will continue to retry to send the email for *at least* 4 hours, some will try for 2-3 days. if your new site has a basically functional network (ie, router, DNS, everything is already set up when you roll the server in), it shouldnt skip a beat. working DNS will be very important, or may mails could be rejected once the sending server actually gets a change to make the delivery.

this of course is also based on the assumption that you have good backups, and perhaps even a seperate server ready to builtout incase you drop the thing getting in the doorway.

if i were in your shoes, and i had 1 server to work with, i would do it like this:

1) at least a week in advance, set up the new site. get the router on line, get the DNS server online. use a laptop to test the new internet connections functionality. predetermine what the email servers new ip address will be, and configure the router to forward port 25, or whatever your method of delivering email is to the new ip.

2) same time frame, adjust the public DNS information to specify a new MX record against the new routers outside ip at the new site. your domain now has 2 MX records, even tho one of them is dormant at this moment.

3) on the day of your move, stop the services on your email server. add the new ip as a second ip, change the default gateway to the new routers inside ip, add the new DNS server from the new site as the preferred lookup, power down.

4) pack, transport. plug the server in, it should boot up with its new ip configuration, and immediatly start servicing request that are following to the secondary MX record.

5) remove the original MX record from the public DNS, the new site is now the single MX.
Click to expand...


What he said ;)
 
And if you want to minimize losses, schedule a move during a night or a sunday (hard to get up at night but it's a one-time deal so it should not be a biggie).
 
i think having 2 servers run as once would be the most foolproof, but at the same time there would be all the duplicates..

i do remember on "cyber monday" there was a large ddos attack on our webhost's nameservers.. which consequently is where we have the dns info for the mailserver. a bunch of mails came through a few hours late, but they did make it..

we need to move our whole network too.. so maybe we should use that $13 a year thing to make sure we don't lose any e-mail.. and just spend a day setting all the servers back up..

i think we did order a new cisco firewall through techsoup since we are non-profit.. and we are getting at least a T1 connection there from a new company so it will be different IP addresses, etc.. but we can get it set up ahead of time with their router, and the new firewall.. and work from there..
 
is it going to be possible to ahve 2 servers at one time?

vpn the 2 sites together. set up the new site on your own schedule, 2nd MX record as soon as the server is working. as soon as your happy with it, configure the first server to deliver everything to the second, thru the vpn. configure the users to get their emails from the new server. configure the MX records to prefer the 2nd server, and before long the 1st server will be doing no work.

i recently did pretty much exactly this, just about 3 weeks ago.
 
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