Re: Chosing a Domain Name for .local

On 19/08/10 07:37, happyhacker wrote:
> I have sort of decided to call our install "office.local". We will be
> changing our external Domain Name soon although it is not decided yet to
> what. This generic approach should avoid a reinstall to correct it
> later.

Yes, this is considered best practice.
>
> Is it the MX record that has to change the current email address
> to this form or is it just the fixed IP
> which is configured?
>
> Is the A record adjusted in any way?
>
>
If you get a new public domain name, you get a complete new set of DNS
records for it, hosted wherever you buy the name. You will need at least
one A record pointing to your fixed IP address.

The new MX record must contain the hostname (*not* the IP address) of
the SMTP server which handles your mail i.e. if you will receive mail by
SMTP, it must contain the name of an A record which points to your IP
address, if you will be using POP3/IMAP from an external mail host or
anti-spam service, the MX must contain the hostname of their incoming
mail server. You can have multiple MX records with priorities, so that
lower priority servers will be tried if the top priority server does not
respond. This needs thinking about, it is not necessarily a good idea.

If you expect to send email directly, rather than through a smarthost,
you will also need a PTR record at your ISP for your IP address,
pointing to an A record which points back to your IP address. It would
probably be a good idea to make this an A record for your new domain.

You need to run the SBS wizard to change the email settings internally,
and if you are still listening to your old email domain for a while,
this also needs to be listed in the recipient policies, and the users'
email addresses checked to make sure all the old variants of addresses
are listed correctly.

--
Joe

On 20/08/10 16:53, happyhacker wrote:
>
> My SBS internal name is "office.local" (as I suggested above). I guess
> SBS will call this "remote.office.local" adding the bit at the front.
>
> I have a fixed IP address which if I type this into the browser I get
> the default IIS7 welcome page which clicks to an IIS site somewhere.
>
> At my ISP I have a DN of mywebsite.org which I have redirected to
> mywebsite.org.uk on a different host.
>
> I have the ability to ad an A, MX, CNAME or TXT record.
>
> With the SBS internal domain what do I need to do to allow just SBS
> collecting the emails from my ISP but also to enable sending of emails
> from the SBS Exchange server so they go safetly through the ISP mail
> server?

Run the SBS email configuration wizard, tell it your external domain
name, tell it you want to send via smarthost, not DNS, and enter the
ISP's outgoing (outgoing as far as your email is concerned) SMTP server
information. You don't need any DNS settings to do this.

Check that your users have the new email addresses you would expect.
Unless previously configured otherwise, Exchange will set these up
automatically but will use logon names, which may not be what you want.

If you're collecting by POP3, then the POP3 Connector needs to know
where to collect from (presumably the same place as at present) and the
new domain's MX record needs the hostname of the ISP's incoming SMTP
server, which presumably is what your current domain's MX contains.

That's the only external DNS setting needed for incoming mail, and the
domain host may well have done that for you by default. You will also be
setting up an A record for something like remote.new-domain.com, to get
remote users to your IP address, and which you can use later for direct
SMTP mail.
>
> Later, when I put the Exchange server to get the emails direct what do I
> need to do then?
>
>
Set up forwarding of TCP port 25 from your router/firewall to the SBS,
and confirm that it works by using telnet from outside to
remote.new-domain.com, sending mail to a valid user of the new domain:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/153119

If there are problems, come back here (or preferably the new web forum)
and get them fixed, then alter the domain MX record to point to your
remote.new-domain.com A record. Continue to collect from the POP3 server
for a week or two, in case someone somewhere is using an old cached MX
record. Receiving from outside by SMTP is independent of using the POP3
Connector, you can use both at the same time and no mail will be lost.

There are detailed walkthroughs of everything on the microsoft.com
website, though it sometimes takes some determination to find what you
want, even when you've seen it there before.

--
Joe