Quoting Tom Browder (2020-02-21 13:17:52) > On Fri, Feb 21, 2020 at 06:00 Jonas Smedegaard <jonas@jones.dk> wrote: > > > Hi tom, > > > ... > > > > Does anyone have strong reasons to use one over another, or any other > > > > choice? > > > ... > > > Depends on the purpose of the name(s). > > ... > > Thanks, Jonas, that makes good sense. Based on that I should use > "mail" and maybe "mail2" for my backup mail server. Only if by "backup" you mean mirror of mail services generally - i.e. also for your users to connect to for fetching their mail when the primary server is down. Otherwise, if you mean MX backup then I would use "mx2" for the backup host (and I would then consider naming the primary host _both_ "mail" and "mx1" so that I can use "mx1" and "mx2" for MX records. > One of the reasons I asked was I know Gmail used to use something like > " smtp.gmail.com" for its smtp server and thought that might be > popular among sysadmins with such servers. Lots of names are popular for various reasons. Google has numerous hosts serving specifc services, likely with failover so that one hostname is even used for multiple hosts behind the scenes. So if your setup is complex, then name each service, and number it too. ...but if you want simplicity, then beware that for each hostname you may (now or later) need to fumble with TLS certificates and/or DNSSEC signing keys. ...and beware that your users are not helped by hosts named by services but will likely find it geeky that they need to use "smpt2" to send and "pop3" to receive (unless of course they are all geeks, where they might prefer hosts named by characters in Tolkien books or Star Wars). As Michael also mentioned, some mail clients blindly assume the world uses specific names for user-facing incoming and outgoing services, and probe those names before asking the user. Personally I have found it least confusing for my users to tell them that "the server is mail-dot-our-domain for all user-facing services - both incoming and outgoing", and I then setup hints for those mail clients that wants to auto-configure. - Jonas -- * Jonas Smedegaard - idealist & Internet-arkitekt * Tlf.: +45 40843136 Website: http://dr.jones.dk/ [x] quote me freely [ ] ask before reusing [ ] keep private
Attachment:
signature.asc
Description: signature