general - Mail issues

I'm not even sure where this should go, but since we use apache, this is where i'm starting.

I am looking for several possible solutions, so please throw me any ideas you may have.

We have mail.domain.com, it sends mail just fine, until cpanel does a major to semi-major update and our named.conf file gets updated and recursion set to 'no'. We work 9-5 and we have people registering on our site from 50 states and 43 foreign countries that have to get the email when they request it (i.e. not 9-5). Because of this, we don't find out until 9am the next day that ~173 emails did not make it out, because our server was locked down from speaking to the outside world for 15 hours.

I think (after researching cpanel) that setting up our server to default to another mail server (maybe google for example) if we receive a 550 error would be best, but I'm not sure if this is even possible.

I also think a solution could be configuring apache to always keep our named.conf file, but I have no idea how to do this. And even then, this would only be a semi-fix, since these updates can mess with other dns related files as well.

Any suggestions/ideas?

Thanks for any help.

This could go in DNS or Mail Server or even Scripts since it's really cPanel that's giving you the problem. I'll move it when I figure out which one would be best.

Can you not do your cPanel updates 9-5?

What if you changed the permissions on named.conf so it couldn't be written by cPanel?

I don't believe Google will just let you relay across their server when your server is down. You'd have to have another mail server locally that was set to allow relay from your existing server.

jharnois, thanks for taking care of the move, I apologize for the mis-placement.

We are on a VPS, and the updates, as far as I know, cannot be controlled. I can understand why our provider would not allow their customers to control the cpup, since it could pose a serious risk if someone did not update a major security fix.

Changing the permissions is the best idea yet, but I'm not certain cpanel wouldn't simply override it, since named.conf mis-configuration could pose security risks, at the least dos attacks. I would like to find a fix that is apache based, maybe a cron job (a foreign language to me right now) that checks named.conf, and replaces it with a copy if anything has changed. But then again, it would have to be aware of when the updates take place.

I'm uneasy about the changing permissions, because I would hate to see cpanel hang, and then the site be down for an undetermined time. What do you think?

It goes without saying that I am new to this, so all help is much appreciated.

I'd still try this first, but I guess it depends on how important your up time is. You cold ask your host when the update occurs and monitor the server at those times when you know an update is coming.That's not an Apache solution. Apache is not the problem here, so I don't think you'll find an Apache solution.

cron is a feature of the linux operating system, and it's only responsible for launching an application/script. You'd have to build the script, probably in Perl, possibly in PHP, that cron launches.

named.conf is part of the DNS server (probably BIND).

cPanel is a third party do all application and is not directly related to Apache beyond configuration, but again, Apache configuration is not the problem nor the solution.


Have you tried asking this in a cPanel specific support forum? Maybe there's a cPanel setting that will keep this from happening.


I'm still not sure where to move this

You just cleared up several things for me jharnois. You're probably right about the cpanel forum, I'll give it a shot.

Thanks much.

Please let us know what you find out since that will probably determine where I move this.

Thread moved from Apache to Scripts ... this appears to be caused by cPanel.