IBM is hosting an Open Mic conference call with Lotus Development and Support Engineering to discuss Domino Mail Routing Configuration (versions 6, 7 & 8)
The Open Mic call will be held on Thursday, May 22’nd 2008 (corrected day of the week). This call will take place in one session at 10:00 AM EDT. The call will last 60 minutes. Please dial into the call 5 minutes before the scheduled start. This conference call is designed to be an open question & answer format, so bring your questions.
You may find it helpful to review the following resources prior to the conference call:
Best practices for large Lotus Notes mail files
How to limit the number of threads used for sending large messages
Controlling spam: Advanced SMTP settings in Lotus Domino (see Parts 1 & 2)
Please refer to the Open Mic Tech Flash for details about the conference call numbers. Please post any advanced questions within the ND8 forum by creating a response to this document. This Open Mic call will be recorded for future use, and will be made available via the Flash after the call.
Subject: Please confirm the date
May 22nd is a Thursday. Is the call on the 22nd or 21st?
Subject: Clarification
Apologies. The day should read Thursday May 22nd. Thank you for pointing that out.
Subject: Q) SENDMAIL DAEMON on AIX & Domino 7.0.3?
In an AIX 5.3 / Domino 7.0.3 environment can the sendmail daemon be configured to run with Notes Mail? If so please describe any configuration changes necessary. Also, please discuss how AIX & Domino differentiate between AIX userids using an internet address vs. a Notes userid with the same internet address. Currently this is not being used as a mail server but the reason the sendmail daemon is needed is a Notes app was written with interfaces dependent on the sendmail function. One quick answer is maybe the Notes app needs to be re-written without the sendmail dependency.
Subject: Sendmail and Domino on the same AIX box
I’ll start by disclaiming any skills as an AIX expert, but the following comes from my general understanding of Domino and the independence of services/daemons.
The key thing here is for sendmail and Domino not to try to listen on the same IP address and TCP port. Both will normally want to listen on port 25. Whether they use the same IP address will depend on how your AIX machine (or the LPAR that’s running these services) is configured.
The simplest solution (in conceptual terms) would be to have different IP addresses for Domino and sendmail. In Domino, you may need to use the IP port restriction settings usually used for partitioned servers to tell Domino which address to use. You’ll need to consult the sendmail docs to see how you configure that side of things.
An alternative would be to have your primary mail system (seems to be Domino) listen on the conventional TCP port 25, and then set the other one (sendmail) to listen on a higher port (e.g. 2525). You would need to configure both sendmail and the connecting application to use this port.
With either approach, you then have two separate mail servers that can interact or not as you decide. For example, you could configure sendmail to relay all messages to Domino, or vice versa.
One last question. Is there a particular reason why this app needs to use sendmail? Generally any message sent to a sendmail server could be routed just as easily via Domino, but if the app actually hooks into the sendmail code then you may be more restricted.
You also asked about how this set up would handle users in the local domain. I suspect your sendmail system will need to be configured just to relay mail to Domino (rather than deliver to any local users), but more info may be needed here.
Hope that helps,
Rupert Clayton
Chicago
Subject: No Backscatter for Lotus Domino Project
On the conference call today there was lots of talk about creating rules to help block “backscatter” spam messages. It seemed like there were not many options to control this. It seems as though this problem is getting worse.
I saw this timely entry on the PlanetLotus website (http://planetlotus.org) yesterday…
Mayflower Software (makers of SpamSentinel) has built a free server addin for Lotus Notes and Domino, to help reduce Backscatter that arrives at your Domino servers.
Announcement:
http://blog.maysoft.org/blog.nsf/d6plinks/FPAO-7E758T
Download:
Mark
Subject: Two ways the router could be enhanced to reject backscatter
The Open Mic call had a number of questions about handling “backscatter” – non-delivery reports that come from other servers on the Internet when a spammer has used the real e-mail address of one of your users as the apparent message sender.
One of the most promising approaches seemed to be a free third-party plug-in from Maysoft that it claims can reject 80-90% of backscatter while still allowing through genuine NDRs. The URL is: SpamSentinel No Backscatter FAQ
The Maysoft plug-in is described as examining the received NDRs to determine whether they are reponding to messages genuinely sent out from this Domino server.
This raised a couple of questions for me:
The answer to the second has to be yes, and it seems there are two techniques that could distinguish genuine NDRs from backscatter.
One technique would be similar to ND8’s capability to thread Internet mail “conversations”. If the router can identify a received Internet message as being a response to an earlier message sent by a Notes user, then the same capability should be workable for NDRs. Of course this would depend on the original message still being available in the sender’s mail file. And there’s a potential performance impact from the receiving server having to search for the message in the apparent sender’s mail file.
The other approach is (I assume) the one being used by Maysoft. This would just examine the SMTP headers and decide whether the message appears to have been generated by a real message from your domain. If the system generating the NDR has included the orginal message as a “message/rfc822” MIME part, then there is information here that can be checked for authenticity or correlated with sent messages.
Any thoughts from Lotus’ developers on whether either approach might be considered as an option for the router and SMTP tasks in 8.5?
Rupert Clayton
Chicago
Subject: Need More of an Agenda/Baseline
I appreciate these calls and their aims however, on previous calls, they weren’t as helpful as they could be because there was no real starting point. I understand that these are supposed to be free form, stream of consciousness sorts of things but if I have a question, I can open a PMR.
These calls need more of an agenda or some sort of baseline. I also understand that the articles are there for a baseline but when I think “Domino Mail Routing Configuration”, I’m not really thinking a 2.5 year old article on large mail databases or a 4 year old article on controlling spam hits the mark.
How about something on basic routing info/configs; notes.ini settings; the finer points of routing; changes in 8; those sorts of things? I want to learn something on this. I have a Jr. admin I’m trying to get up to speed on Domino and these things don’t help him or anyone else for that matter unless you put the subject in proper focus.
Thanks!
Subject: More of an agenda
Thanks for your feedback. I understand completely where you are coming from. We are working to provide two types of calls to the open public. The first is an Open Mic (which is the format of this invitation), which is a free flowing unplanned call. The other is a Webcast, which is more structured with a presentation followed by Q&A. We have only had one WebCast so far for Notes Domino, which was last week on Out of Office. We had some technical difficulties that we need to iron out before the next Webcast.
I will take note that you are interested in Mail Routing as a topic for a Webcast (in addition to the Open Mic we are having). The specifics you list are helpful in planning. I’m not sure of the date of availability, but customer requested topics clearly take priority. Thanks again for the feedback.
Subject: Requested topic
I have been working on mail failover for our global network and among clustered servers. I would like to discuss this in the call, as well.
Subject: Cluster failover
I would like to talk reagarding cluster failover as well. In R6.5.4 we are still facing mail routing issues when one cluster partner goes down. Is there some enhancement in R8 in this area?
Subject: Cluster failover
We are running 7.0.2, and facing the same problem.Mailrouting doesn’t failover or load balance to the other cluster member.
Mailrouting is DNN based.
Subject: Troubleshooting Cluster Failover for Mail Routing
As mentioned in the call, you can enable the following notes.ini on servers that don’t appear to be failing over properly:
RouterDebugClusterFailover=1
This will log useful troubleshooting data every time a cluster failover is attempted. I was mistaken earlier when I said this notes.ini is only available in 6.5.5 and forward - it is also available in 6.5.4FP1-FP3.
It is most helpful when combined with
DebugRouter=2 or DebugRouter=3
as this will also trace various routing table operations, which could also be a factor if you have having problems failing over.
Mike