Message Board

Donating MX Entries

Editing DNS

Author: A.Roy (13 Apr 05 3:15pm)

Hi, my ISP's interface for editing the DNS (freeparking.co.uk) is as shown
http://union.surrey.ac.uk/images/mxrecord.png

the name of the subdomain I have donated is mailserve and I originally had it on priority code 20, but when I drop the list down to mailserve and put in the domain name, and then press apply the interface reverts to N/A and the domain donation is rejected.

I have now changed it to the top priority (as shown) but it still shows N/A
I am also worried that having it above the other subdomains means my real mail will go to the wrong place

Re: Editing DNS

Author: O.Pacuraru (7 May 07 8:55am)

I am worried about the same thing.

what priority shoudl I set the donated mx record to? can I set it to something higher than my "real" mx record which obviously is 10?

what if I really have some mail problems, won't my mails be handed over to the next mx server aka the donated one?

Re: Editing DNS

Author: M.Prince (7 May 07 12:50pm)

You should only donate a domain or subdomain that is NOT being used for real mail. Your concern is that real mail will be handed to Project Honey Pot's mail server. That would ONLY happen if you donated a domain used for real mail already. Here's an example:

Let's say you're using example.com for your real mail:

o.pacuraru@example.com

The MXs for that may be:

example.com 10 mailserver.com
example.com 20 mailservertwo.com

Leave that alone. If you want to donate a domain, setup a completely different subdomain:

hpot.example.com

When you first set that up, it will have no MXs. Now... go ahead and setup MXs for that that point however we've instructed you to:

hpot.example.com 10 mx1.phpotmailserver.com
hpot.example.com 20 mx1.phpotmailserver.com

It doesn't matter what the priorities are. You could make them 0, you could make them 10, you could make them 50... whatever. The key is that ALL the MXs for the donated domain MUST point to the Project Honey Pot mail server. If ANY of the MXs do not point to the Project Honey Pot mail server then we assume the domain is handling real mail and we don't complete the donation.

Note that the mail servers for every subdomain you setup can be different from one another, and different from the root domain. In other words, setting hpot.example.com to point to us will have no effect on example.com or sub2.example.com.

Hopefully that makes sense.

Matthew.