If anyone tried to email me via ianhaken.com in the last three weeks, you probably met with little success. My contract for dedicated hosting ended at the beginning of the year, and for my small personal uses it wasn't worth the cost to renew it. Since I already had an always-on file server at home, I decided to move my hosting services to my own server. After some downtime associated with transfering domain registrars, I was able to get this much setup.
Since I'm just hosting on a cheap ISP connection, I of course don't get a static IP. Many free DNS services offer dynamic IP update clients which solve this problem, but of course you can't quite take advantage of your personal domain name. I took advantage of a tip I received to redirect all hostname lookups with a CNAME entry to my dynamic DNS domain name, which stays up-to-date with the free client. So in short, a little indirection was able to solve the dynamic IP problem.
What I failed to realize is the affect this would have on my MX records. While I had them properly configured for my domain name, I realized that mail was still not getting through. It took me longer than it should have to perform a manual MX lookup and figure out that my CNAME was being resolved and then MX records were being searched for this canonical name rather than ianhaken.com. So after adding identical MX records to my dynamic IP service all seems to be well again.
On a related note, I've also been trying to get exim working on my internal server. Since I do run a dynamic IP I can't run a full-blown mail-server, but I'll I really want to do is be able to send outbound messages anyway. I've been able to make this happen by configuring exim use gmail as a smarthost. Ideally, I would also like local mail to be delivered to my external mailbox. I figured this would do it:
echo myname@gmail.com > ~/.forward
and it seems to get half way there. Sending a message to myname@localhost results in the following lines in my log:
2008-01-06 13:50:46 1JBdOI-0005sm-4Q <= myname@localhost U=myname P=local S=388
2008-01-06 13:50:48 1JBdOI-0005sm-4Q => myname@gmail.com R=smarthost T=remote_smtp_smarthost H=gmail-smtp.l.google.com [209.85.199.109] X=TLS-1.0:RSA_3DES_EDE_CBC_SHA1:24 DN="C=US,ST=California,L=Mountain View,O=Google Inc,CN=smtp.gmail.com"
2008-01-06 13:50:48 1JBdOI-0005sm-4Q Completed
By the look of it, exim realizes it is supposed to be delivering out to the smarthost, but it's still sending to myname@localhost. At any rate, I'm definitely not seeing anything in my inbox on either end. Anyone know if I'm just not understanding the .forward file or is there something in the exim config I need to change? It's not particularly critical, but it would be nice to see error mail go to my inbox.
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