New Exchange Server Setup

[EST7745]

I just got finished installed Exchange 2003 on a new server. This is not a migration. The company has never ran Exchange before. Now that I have exchange installed, I'm rather fuzzy on what happens next. I have a domain registered with Network Solutions, however I'm having a hard time understanding what else needs to happen. I have a DSL line committed to the Exchange server. The DSL line is supplying a static IP address. I know that I have to establish an MX record on the internet however I also know that I'm missing many other steps. Any information on what I need to do would be very much appreciated.

 

[58sniper]

Create an "A" record in your public DNS for your public IP address. Something like office.domain.com or mail.domain.com.

Forward port 25 from your firewall to your Exchange box. You might also want to forward port 443 if you're going to use OWA over HTTPS, or port 80 for OWA over HTTP.

Once that's done, and you can telnet to that A record over port 25, set your MX record to point to that A record. After a while, mail should start to come in.

Also, have your ISP create a reverse DNS entry for your public IP address.

Pat Richard, MCSE MCSA:Messaging CNA
Want to know how email works? Read for yourself -

http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2821.txt

 

[EST7745]

When you say to create an A record in our "public" dns, are you referring to our local dns server on our LAN or is this something I need to do on Network Solutions website? Also, I think I'm a little confused about how to go about creating the MX record. I need to telnet to the server in order to create the MX record?

 

[ITsmyfault]

you need to create the "A" record & MX record with whoever is hosting your authoritative DNS. In this case it sounds like NetSol is doing that. Point being, this is how the rest of the world finds you - a DNS lookup. Which DNS is the question. You can host this if you want, but it is better outsourced to someone with multiple datacenters etc.

Whoever is hosting your DNS will be setting up a zone file for you. You need something like:
Zone: mydomain.com
@ IN A <ip of server>

- this IP can be the mydomain.com server or pretty much whatever you want it to be.

Now you need mx (mail exchange) records. You can have up to 5 of these. It's the only part of DNS which is built for redundancy. lower # = higher preference. This is how other mail servers find your mail server to send you stuff. Their mail server is told (by a user) 'send an email to bob@mydomain.com Their mailserver then makes a dns query to find the MX record for mydomain.com and attempts to contact it. You add lines like this to your zone file:

@ IN MX 5 mymailserver.mydomain.com.
@ IN MX 10 mybackupmailserver.mydomain.com.

That will get mail coming in. Be sure to have them set up a reverse PTR record - many servers will no accept mail from servers who do not have these records set up. Aka the in-addr-arpa.

Also make sure your server identifies itself with the correct name when queried. If your server's dns resolves to "mail.mydomain.com" make sure that it how the server ID's itself when it responds to other servers. To test this, telnet to port 25 on your mailserver and see how it ID's itself. Go out to dos, type telnet 11.22.33.44 25 (enter)
the server will respond with something like:
"220 mail.mydomain.com etc etc etc.. ready

Last, to help you troubleshoot, use

http://www.dnsreport.com

to get an idea of how you look to the world.

have fun!