You just completed installing a brand new mail server, and the mailboxes have been configured and enabled. The newly mounted server is a monster: able to take punishment, heavy loads, and process data in a flash. The quarantine and filter databases have been placed in a DMZ environment separate from the rest of the network, and you’re thinking to yourself, ‘Now I’ve got the upper hand on those spammers.’
After a couple of days testing, the server is ready to go live. The switch is turned on followed by a flood of emails but the flood is not getting processed. Your new bad boy of a server is not living up to expectations. The server is being hit with more messages than it can handle, with the ensuing pile up causing major delays in mail delivery and productivity. You dig through every aspect of your mail server looking for everything you can think of from faulty hardware (the raid disk) to memory leaks, to errors in the Event Viewer. You begin to wonder about a corrupt mail software installation, and attempt to reinstall the software but with no success. You begin to check Internet forums and knowledge base information for any clues to explain your mail server’s behavior and find nothing: no patches, no fixes, no workarounds.
Just when you are about to throw in the towel, you begin to investigate the environment in which the mail server is installed. You start by using simple command prompt tests such as telnet and tracert from your mail server to different nodes on your network. The mail server’s gateway is tested, along with the established connections on the mail server, followed by an extended ping command to the SQL Server.
Finally! The results reveal a major problem with the SQL Server: the ping back results show a 500ms delay. This is not acceptable in a small network environment. After further investigation you discover the DMZ router is not able to support the traffic load: the hardware hadn’t been double checked for compatibility with its environment. Once the proper changes are done, your new mail server is rolling like never before, just spewing out emails.
The moral: it’s not enough to assume that one piece of equipment will solve all your problems. A quick overview of the environment could have saved many hours of frustration. Know your environment and what you are getting into. Planting a small tree in a large forest does not mean its chance of survival is 100 percent!
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