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Can someone confirm my thoughts...
I have a mail server that is served by 1 WAN connection, 1 MX record (mx00).
Can I install a second WAN connection (my router does support it) and then create a second MX record (mx01) with the new WAN IP? And if so, if they both have the same priority it will effectively load balance? If I set mx00 at 5 and mx01 at 10, will it failover to mx01 if mx00 is unavailable?
I'm actually more interested in redundancy rather than load balancing..
Correct on the redudency, not sure about load balancing though, my suspinsion would be that this would not work.
For redundancy can you not setup a mailforward wiht your ISP and use them as your secondary MX record, that way you will have redundancy on both the line and server.
No, the MX records don't load balance like that. They MIGHT but it's like with nameservers, software tends to be lazy and go for #1 first.
mx record just points at the ip address of your mail server, adding in extra possible network paths and load balancing traffic across them is a different thing.
Perfect - thanks - as I said I'm actually more interested in the redundancy rather than balancing.
Thanks guys!
I've sort of had a similar situation with a customer recently, I'd set one at 5 and one at 10, it will fail to the second record on failure, however with redundancy you've still got a single point of failure at the router or even the mail server, so maybe a backup mx service may be a better plan, that way email is stored off site in case of on site failure and will be downloaded when reconnected (this worked better for me as the office was in a small rural village with inconsistent power issues during bad weather and only BT cabled DSL options).