Category Archives: Inside Jag’s head

Well Ive been out of the office and busy a bee the last few days. This time there is no silly software or service announcement, no its much greater than that. On monday apr 24th, at 5:08pm we welcomed a new member to our family. Anna Reese Landis was born at only 19.5 inches long and 6 lbs 11 onces . She came home yesterday with mom and both are doing very well. She has one sister (Sydnie) and one borther (Greg). Sydnie will be 6yrs old this Aug and Gregory turned 3yrs old this month. We’re trying to soak in all the baby time we can becuase they truly do grow up so fast.

One of the most common first questions people ask is; Is this your first child?  No, shes our 3rd.
Most people pause there becuase apparantly people are planning larger families much more these days. When asked if she will be last most parents reply with  “oh ya!” by the third child but honestly me and my wife could see us with more. Whats weird is with one kid going on two you just cant imagine how you can love another person as much as your child. When your second child is born you learn something very important, love isnt divded among the people you love, its multiplied with each new person. I could see us reaching the 4 or 5 kid mark even. Now our home is happily filled with 3x the love and growing. Welcome home Anna.

I see it happen sometimes when a service fails on a server such as email and clients, rightfully so, freak out to say the least. “HEELLLPPP, Im about to lose a $1million deal becuase my email is down”. Sound funny? Not to that guy! Ok so your asking who does a $1MM deal via email, well I don’t know how true that is and really don’t beleive that is anything short of extreme exageration but I have heard before. The first thought that comes to mind is, who does a $1MM deal from a $10 hosting account? Well the fact is that jsut becuase you aren’t closing some big deal via doesn’t mean your email is not important. Protecting that mail and ensuring you and your recipient get it is also important. Heres a few things I can think of to help you keep the mail flowing without spending thousands on larger redundant clusters:

Setup an alternate account on another server as a backup and make sure your dns zeon files have multiple MX (mail) records with decreasing priorties. Whats all that really mean?

Lets say you have www.siteA.com with us on a server, lets call it Earth. Well one day Earth goes down due to hardware failure or just the mail service goes out due to some other problem. In this situation your mail would likely just bounce around until the server is back up and the server can receive it. In other cases it could be lost to the internet gremlins forever but in either case you won’t be getting it anytime soon if ever.

What you could do to prevent this is setup a backup account on another server, lets call it Mars. Your dns zone file would have a second MX priority (dont worry, our techs know what this is even if you dont) which points to Mars.

Now when Earths mail server isnt accesible before the message gets returned its already been told by the dns server that this zeon (this domain name) has another mail server it can try. Now your mail will be routed to the Mars server where you can retreive it at your leisure. That email will not be sent again to Earth server, nor will it be lost to space. When Earth server starts listening and responding to requests aghain, your email will starting going to it again by default.

Give it a shoot, we can help you set this up so that $1MM account isnt lost and your peace of mind is secured by just one low cost shared account.

This is our first test post. Lets go blogging!