I should have posted this Monday but our email is back up and running. Our web developer who handles the DNS records made the change Sunday and all of the changes propagated correctly so that when everyone came in Monday they should have been good to go.
The problem was confirmed by our hosting company and basically all I could do all week was wait. Since the hosting company didn't handle DNS records, they couldn't help me. I could have attempted to hack my way into our DNS records to change them but I wasn't about to go that route (though I was being pressured I almost did). Basically it just took us waiting for the developer to make the correct change when he got back in town.
The thing about this problem is that it should have been corrected long ago. Our hosting company changed configurations with their email server due to a DoS that happened. They turned on SMTP authentication and separated the email so that pop was handled through one server and smtp was handled through another. Our MX record was configured to send SMTP mail through the pop server. We were seeing huge delays and problems for 3-5 weeks before we ultimately were pronounced dead in the water. How it could “work” for those 3-5 weeks with delays then all of a sudden break is a mystery to me. I believe our hosting company made some changes that weekend that basically broke our little round-robin affair.
So who's to blame on this? It's hard to tell. The developer who goofed up the configuration in the first place and subsequently again as a fix (only to get it right the second time) is holding a huge amount of the responsibility. If it was done right the first or second time, we would have either never been down or only been down a day. Ultimately we were down all of last week because of this. Next Tuesday the developer is coming in so that we can discuss ways to prevent this from happening again. I'm gaining more access (read: responsibility) to our DNS changes to make sure things like this don't happen again.
Anyways back to your regularly scheduled bloggings. I intend to post some more technical articles about my OS design as well as go into another email issue I ran into recently. I may even get into some normal programming shortly. The problem is I don't have small projects that I can just bang out, I always have to think of these complex systems that I can barely get out of a design phase. I have a couple of SalesLogix problems that I could post about though since they are general programming issues and not really specific to just that one application.