Friday, October 8, 2004, 3:59:29 AM, Len wrote: LC> A ugly kludge and waste for our time, but MS is MS.
I have run across this before, as a matter of fact, this is the third time I've seen it on the list, and that doesn't count the threads I may have skipped. It has to do with a very poor choice of DNS layout, and despite Len blaming MS, it really comes down to the nit wit in charge of designing the MX layout for MSN and Hotmail, which could easily have been a Unix admin for some other ISP, it has nothing to do with platform. If you look at http://www.dnsstuff.com/tools/lookup.ch?name=hotmail.com&type=MX you'll see that they have 4 MX records, looks real nice, until you realize that some twit has each record pointing to RoundRobin A records, this should be banned by the RFC's if it is not. They actually have 16 MX servers (4 per MX), with as few as 4 down servers, your mail server could think they are completely down (your A queries are unlucky enough to get the 4 down IP's, you won't requery until ttl expires). I personally have seen as may as 6 servers down. -- Best regards, Charles mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] To Unsubscribe: http://www.ipswitch.com/support/mailing-lists.html List Archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/imail_forum%40list.ipswitch.com/ Knowledge Base/FAQ: http://www.ipswitch.com/support/IMail/
