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Reverse DNS

Sometime a month or two ago, sending email to my family stopped working. My emails vanished into the void and were never heard from again.

I figured my SMTP was set up incorrectly so no big deal, I used another (gmail etc.). Recently I got around to looking in my logs and I discovered:

Jul 23 17:06:49 ffclassic postfix/smtp[30408]: 73B3C4654756: host mx2.comcast.net[76.96.30.116] refused to talk to me: 421 IMTA24.emeryville.ca.mail.comcast.net comcast Reverse DNS failure : Try again later

Well that's no fun. I guess Comcast doesn't like talking to mail servers without reverse DNS set up properly. So now I fixed it (hopefully, we'll see in 24 hours).

These are the joys of running my own server. I had the option from my host of getting CPanel or its equivalent, or setting up everything by hand, so I chose by hand. The bad thing is that I have no idea what I'm doing. The good thing is there's no better way to learn than writing all of your config files by hand.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 23rd, 2008 at 6:04 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Or subscribe to comments below to receive email notifications. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One Response to “Reverse DNS”

  1. July 23rd, 2008 at 7:32 pm
    Quoth Jason Lynch:

    I actually find cPanel kind of a pain to manage. Sure, it pretty much handles things on its own, but it has some definite disadvantages:

    First, if you want to customize something, good luck. In many cases, even if you change configuration files, it'll just rewrite them later. The second major problem is that I'm forced to run a compatible OS, which is pretty much CentOS or Fedora Core, and Fedora Core was buggy last time I tried, and CentOS makes me want to cry.

    So, I do maintain both a cPanel server and one I'm rolling myself on Gentoo, and I find the Gentoo one a lot more “fun” to manage, even if it is technically more work. Then again, I can set it up just the way I like, which I can't do with the cPanel one.

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