topic MTA Forwarding to multiple servers in Firewall and Security Management

MTA Forwarding to multiple servers

rajko — Fri, 09 Oct 2020 14:40:41 GMT

Hello everyone,

Today I setup MTA on the sandbox appliance.
I'm looking for a setup example with multiple exchange servers that MTA should forward mails to. How to set it up properly? Currently, MTA forwarding messages only to one EXC server, and I need some load balancing between 4 EXCHANGE servers.

Greetings.
I really appreciate any help you can provide.

Re: MTA Forwarding to multiple servers

Chris_Atkinson — Sat, 10 Oct 2020 13:18:57 GMT

Click the Next Hop cell and select the node object that is the mail server for this rule.

Note - From R80.20, you can define a domain object as the Next Hop. This lets you use multiple mail servers based on a DNS name. This DNS configuration allows load balancing and high-availability capabilities based on DNS configuration.

Re: MTA Forwarding to multiple servers

rajko — Tue, 13 Oct 2020 07:41:22 GMT

Thank you Chris!

Re: MTA Forwarding to multiple servers

flachance — Tue, 03 Nov 2020 19:10:06 GMT

Hi, I'm curious how this went for you as we'll have to do something similar in the near future. Did you setup four entries in your dns all with the same name (mail.domain.com)? One for each of your four exchange servers. I'm not familiar with Checkpoint domain objects, from what I understand if you put .domain.com, it'll match www.domain.com or domain.com. How do you make it match your mail.domain.com?

Re: MTA Forwarding to multiple servers

Wolfgang — Tue, 03 Nov 2020 19:32:17 GMT

@flachance

yes, you have to setup one dns alias with four IPs for your "mailserver.domain.com". If you define a FQDN-Domainobject with name ".mailserver.domain.com" (be sure to check the FQDN box) this will match for "mailserver.domain.com" and "www.mailserver.domain.com". The additional match for the leading "www." is an automatic behaviour.

Be aware that this is not a really HighAvailibility, it's DNS round robin only. If one of the mailservers did not response the messages are not delivered.

Wolfgang