[web admin] Does This Look Right?

[admedia]

I am moving sites to my fresh new account over at Media Temple.

One of my clients uses their own mail server.
I had my current host set that up for me, but it looks like I can manage that using the Plesk CP provided at Media Temple.

Here is how I currently have it set up.

mydomain.com.	          NS	     ns.mydomain.com.	
ns.mydomain.com.	  A	     64.207.100.100	
mydomain.com.	          A	     64.207.100.100
mail.mydomain.com.	  A	     66.88.197.194
ftp.mydomain.com.	  CNAME	     mydomain.com.	
www.mydomain.com.         CNAME      mydomain.com.	
mydomain.com.	          MX (10)    mail.mydomain.com.	
64.207.100.100 / 24	  PTR	     mydomain.com.

So where, for this example... 64.207.100.100 is the IP for my server, and 66.88.197.194 is the IP for the Exange server provided by my client.

All I did was change the record for mail.mydomain.com to their Exchange server IP address. I have never done that before and would like a second pair of eyes before we test it. I believe this is how it is set up on their current server as their MX record resolves to mail.mydomain.com still.

Thanks.

[Natsia]

Try it and see if it works.

[admedia]

Try it and see if it works.

Well it's my client's mailserver, so come Monday or Tuesday we will... but at that point I will be changing the Name Server record for the domain, so it's kind of critical that it works out of the box. I don't want to f up their mail.

I there some way to test before I change the DNS for the domain?

[Natsia]

I usually go by trial and error.
You should be able to change the DNS even after you've set it up.
Why not call your host and find out?
Rather play it safe before you melt the server :P

[admedia]

I guess I didn't think through the whole testing thing enough.

So I can test the domain on the new server just fine here by editing my local host file. Maybe that would apply to email as well? So I sent a test email and it didn't bounce back. Then I uploaded a form to the new server to send me an email and that worked fine, then I used the form to send them another test....

So as long as they are getting their tests I should be ok...

.... or so I think.

Thanks.

[Sybersnake]

looks fine to me.

Well it's my client's mailserver, so come Monday or Tuesday we will... but at that point I will be changing the Name Server record for the domain, so it's kind of critical that it works out of the box. I don't want to f up their mail.

I there some way to test before I change the DNS for the domain?

setup a DNS on your local network, put those records in and set your network adapter to use your local DNS and try it. (Since your local DNS is resolving the names to ips its the same as if you were changing it on the net)

[Jeff2A]

Looks fine (though I've never put parentheses around the metric on the MX line) - be sure you bump the serial so it propagates, else you may be waiting a LONG time to see changes.

[admedia]

Looks fine (though I've never put parentheses around the metric on the MX line) -

Thanks for checking. Yea, that was actually a copy/paste from my Plesk interface so it may not actually be entered that way.

be sure you bump the serial so it propagates, else you may be waiting a LONG time to see changes.

Ok I will try and figure out what that means . I think now would be a good time for me to start learning SSH and working with shell commands. Any suggestions for what I sould use or where to find some basic instructions?

It's odd, I switched 2 domains registered with godaddy at the same exact time. addesignconcepts.com and naplesstudio.com. addesign was switched within 2 hours, naplesstudio still seems to be propigating 18 hours later. I wonder what makes the difference. They were hosted at 2 different hosting companies. Could it be because they previously resided on 2 different backbones?