Weird email & DNS issue

M

modem

Verified User
Joined
Apr 7, 2004
Messages
355
Hello all,

Just as a precursor to this email, I recently installed DirectAdmin on a VPS server and performed a full data backup/restore from the old server to the new VPS. Everything has been working perfectly up until this point when I started noticing a few odd issues.

The first issue was that emails I should have been getting, I were not. These were generated by the server itself via PHP's mail function that came from the "admin" account on my server. I stopped getting those on the 12th. This also included getting emails from Installatron regarding nightly updates.

The next issue was I checked the Exim log and found a few messages frozen there and when I went to check it and retry sending, I got the following error:

2011-06-17 12:16:02 1QXSqa-0007qq-5v User 0 set for local_delivery transport is on the never_users list

Also when opening message "1QXSqa-0007qq-5v" I saw:

1QXSqa-0007qq-5v-D
This message was created automatically by mail delivery software.

A message that you sent could not be delivered to one or more of its
recipients. This is a permanent error. The following address(es) failed:

<removed>@modemnet.net
retry timeout exceeded

------ This is a copy of the message, including all the headers. ------

Return-path: <[email protected]>
Received: from root by stargatesg2.modemnet.net with local (Exim 4.76)
(envelope-from <[email protected]>)
id 1QWMWr-0005Ca-Oz
for <removed>@modemnet.net; Tue, 14 Jun 2011 00:51:09 -0500
To: <removed>@modemnet.net
Subject: =?UTF-8?B?W0luc3RhbGxhdHJvbl0gVXBkYXRlIFN1bW1hcnk=?=
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
Message-Id: <[email protected]>
From: root <[email protected]>
Date: Tue, 14 Jun 2011 00:51:09 -0500

UPDATED INSTALLERS

opencart 1.5.0.4


Anyway... I did some research on this and on network-tools.com I decided to check my DNS records. Well on their website when doing a DNS check on modemnet.net (and other domains hosted on my server) I am given the message:

Retrieving DNS records for modemnet.net...
Attempt to get a DNS server for modemnet.net failed: modemnet.net The query returned a server failure

Does anyone have any insight into this? I'm checking the logs inside of DA and am not seeing any errors related to this.

Suggestions? Thoughts? Help?!

Brad
 
Are you using your server for your email? Or is your email hosted somewhere else?

In your domain control panel, under MX records do you have everything set up correctly?

Your DNS appears to be working properly but it's probably not pointing your email properly. Your IP#, 74.208.106.26 (is that your IP#?) is hosted at 1and1.com, but your email is pointed to sitemil.everyone.net, which is not the same company.

Jeff
 
Jeff,

To answer your questions, 1and1 is the VPS hosting and everyone.net is the email hosting company. Long story why that is setup that way, but for now works.

After writing this post, I have been doing more digging and I think I may have found the root cause. 1and1 assigns two sub-domain names when an account is created: xxxxxx.onlinehome-server.com & xxxxxx.online-home.us. One of these is set as default to the reverse IP mapping while the other was set to the DA server name.

Things seemed to work just fine until I tried to change both of those (for ease of use on my part) to stargatesg1.modemnet-hosting.com. Appearantly as everything began to propogate and resolve, it prevented the entire modemnet.net domain from resolving correctly for about 75% of ISP's. Including going to network-tools.com and trying to ping/trace/dns lookup/etc the modemnet.net domain. Only for it to return a message that it could not find the IP or DNS server failed. However other domains on my same VPS server were resolving just fine (modemnet.biz for example).

Also as I was reading, the DA documentation it also indicated that this would also affect email thus explaining why I was getting that weird message from frozen messages in Exim. It looks like at the moment those messages are beginning to come through as all of these changes propigate.

Any insight or words of wisdom into that? I appreciate the reply message!

Bradley
 
DirectAdmin needs to know if you're hosting email somewhere else. So changes need to be made as shown in your MX Records setting.

Jeff
 
Jeff,

Actually those email settings for @modemnet.net are correct per the everyone.net email system requirements. Having a CNAME record set for their domain, and then have that domain set as the MX record with a preference of 0. Admittedly, I am wanting to get away from email hosting with them ASAP, but other problems prevent that (username/password/data transfers).

Currently, the ongoing issue seems to be that 50% of ISP's recognize the modemnet.net domain, ping it, traceroute it, while the other half don't. It's been 2 days since I made my DNS changes fixing a few issues and normally propagation is much faster than this. So the DNS problem seems to be where my attention is at for now.
 
I've fixed a typo in my last post: something->somewhere.

I was referring to the fact that locally-originated email won't leave the server unless the checkbox is cleared in the MX Records setting for the domain.

Jeff
 
I wanted to let you know I finally discovered the root issue. During the server/IP change the name servers weren't updated properly. The ns1.modemnet-dns.com A record was pointing to the right place/new server. But being a registered name server with the registrar showed it pointing towards the old inactive IP. So some ISP's saw the A record listing and were forwarded to the new server correctly, while others looked beyond that and saw that the registrar was pointing to an old IP.

As for the email problem, that definitely was solved by updating the reverse IP / domain name that I mentioned prior. Everything is definitely working great now. Thanks for all of the advice!

Bradley
 
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