Something Stupid: Not Just for Frank and Nancy Anymore

So imagine you have a network, with various NT4 servers, including a mail server (Exchange 5.5) and BDC named foomail and a proxy server named foonet.  Your internet domain is something like foofoo.com, and for as long as you’ve been connected to the internet, via partial T-1, you’ve had an A and MX record out in the wider world for mail.foofoo.com, which brings you to IIS on server foonet, mainly to use Outlook Web Access.

One of the three drives in the RAID array on foomail starts to die, and space is becoming an issue anyway, so you buy a new server.

Cost being somewhat an issue, you see that you can save $900 by ordering a server with serial ATA (SATA) drives in a RAID5 configuration, rather than SCSI drives as would be traditional.  Then when it arrives, you find out NT won’t support SATA and you have to spend $1200 or so for Windows 2000 Server instead.  Some savings.

You get it all setup, Exchange installed, added to the site, made primary in the site, mailboxes and stuff all migrated, internet mail connector on foonet pointing to it, and it’s great.  Since it has more disk space then every other server combined, and you’ve had several gigs of docs stored in a temporary location since server foodocs died, you even migrate the documents to the new server.  Which turns out to be the brightest spot in all of this, making access to them far faster.

Subsequently, there are lots of RPC errors in communication between the new server, named simply “mail” because you can’t reuse foomail and descriptive simplicity seems sensible, and the rest of the network, mainly foonet.  The very manner in which internet mail transfer functions also spontaneously changes to something that seems worse, but at least seems to work.  Perhaps particularly telling in retrospect, OWA wouldn’t work until I increased the timeout to five minutes.

Sybari Antigen works great on the new server, too, continuing to kill infected e-mails and purge out banned attachment types with utmost reliability.

Sybari Antigen with Spam Manager runs on foonet to do the spam filtering, and that doesn’t go so well.  It stops catching everything reliably.  The product is so outlandishly good that virtually no spam ever got through before.  There is good reason Microsoft became first a customer of Sybari after lab tests showed no other product came close, then bought the company.

Worse, periodically it stops all e-mail flow to and from the internet, eventually getting to where the only resolution was completely removing and reinstalling Sybari’s software, and hoping it would last more than a few weeks this time.  When we renewed the license in March, we went to a newer version and that was even worse.

But I am getting unintentionally long-winded here.

Yesterday I installed HP Digital Sender 4.0 software, which had to go on the server named mail because it has to be on Windows 2000.  It gave me trouble.

It asked me to pick a server to configure, defaulting to the one it was on, and displaying the name mail greyed out.  Going with that, it failed, unable to find server “mail.” I ended up choosing the option for another server, getting the IP address of mail, and entering that.  In the end scanning the the Digital Sender 9200c didn’t work anyway, apparently because it won’t scan to a network location - all configured and enabled - if you have not setup the e-mail portion of things, even if you are never going to use the e-mail part.  Either that or it couldn’t see the server or who knows.  I have to return to it and puzzle it out.

In the process of trying to install the Digital Sending software on mail, I noticed something.

The NetBIOS computer name, for backward compatibility, is indeed “mail.”

It also asks for a “primary DNS suffix” for the computer.  I had, apparently based on something I picked up in my travels, filled that in as foofoo.com, and that makes the server think that its full name is:
mail.foofoo.com

Doh!

Can there be a crazy conflict between external and internal DNS as a result of such an overlap?  Apparently there can.  To me it could explain everything.  Especially since the server it interacts with most closely, foonet, to the wider world is mail.foofoo.com.

I still have to make the relevant change and experiment with it, but… jeez!  What was I thinking?

1. you gotta have the patience of Job to do
   what you do.

   Posted by  on  06/08  at  01:28 PM

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