Best practice for VPS host reboot

[cinergi]

I received a notice from my VPS provider of an upcoming maintenance window on the hardware hosting my mailinabox VPS instance. During the window, the hardware will be rebooted and the provider is recommending that all customer VPS’s be shut down before the window to prevent potential file system issues resulting from improper shutdown. In my case, it would mean shutting down my mailinabox for ~7 hours, which I’d rather not do since I don’t want to lose mail.

Has anyone had experience with VPS hosting maintenance windows? Can my instance be left running reasonably safely?

Thanks

[eXTric]

There should not be an issue with a short downtime as long as you have a 2nd DNS server (which is not on the box) that can resolve. The other servers will try to resend the emails multiple times for a longer period if your server is down but the DNS records exist.

MX failover server

Hi ! First, sorry for my bad english … Second, a big thanks for this great project, it works like a charm ! Before pass it on production, I’m aware about downtime and possibly lost of mails. Murphy’'s rules says this will happen at the worst time … Adding a “MX 20 backup.example.com” rule in the “Custom DNS” goes to an alert and it’s not supported I’m looking for adding a failover mail relay, by adding the rule in DNS config directly in /etc/nsd/zones/ but the script overwrite it at every u…

Random "Secondary nameserver is not configured to resolve this domain."

Interesting and good to know, thanks! I always like to know about providers providing Secondary DNS service for “free” since I am such a proponent of using it. So far my short list is: Puck Secondary DNS (Free) Hurricane Electric (Free) 1984 FreeDNS (Free - No Services Required) Gandi NS6 (Free for domains registered via Gandi) Hetzner also offers it but I have not found it to be overly simple to enable. and now Linode DNS Manager (Free with at least one VPS) Anyone have any more …

[cinergi]

Thanks. My DNS is hosted at Cloudflare, not on the box, so that’s fine. Is there a standard defined period of time during which a mail server will attempt re-delivery before giving up?

[eXTric]

I believe 2-3 days

External and internal DNS

If you are using the domain only for the mail server, it doesn’t really matter if the DNS dies together with the mail server since the mail server is not reachable anyway. Mails usually try to resend (i think up to 3 days) if the mail server is not reachable, other wise it will drop the mail, and probably, if the sender’s mail server is properly configured, will send a alert to the sender. I’ve created a post on how to create secondary server for free, which can ensure your DNS is up (e.g. you…