I run postfix on an 'always on' machine at home and have the MX record for my domain pointing at this machine.
Obviously there are occasional downtimes, for example this morning we had a 3 hour power failure and I also need to upgrade the machine occasionally. Now I could of course overcome some of these down times (by using a UPS etc.) but I have other priorities really so I think things are likely to stay much as they are at present. So, if I set up a lower priority backup MX record pointing at a virtual machine I run on a domain right away from my home machines would I actually win anything much apart from yet another bit of admin required? Sending systems will automatically back off and retry at intervals (I have seen this happen when I have upgraded my home server in the past) so will a secondary/backup MX actually help at all? Another approach I might take is to have a backup machine here at home with Postfix configured on it to take over if I know I'm doing an upgrade on the main machine. All I would need to do to swap would be to change the port forwarding destination on my router. Does anyone here do something like this and are there any 'gotchas'? -- Chris Green
