We have a customer who has a single server (windows 2k3) fsname.theirdomain.com. Their domain name exists in the outside world. and mx.theirdomain.com are hosted externally. I think their web server is hosted by their ISP, and their mail server is hosted by yet another party. I thought it was bad for a local internal server to have a domain name that exists in the outside world (unless it’s hosting such services as web and email and registrar records point to it).
They’ve had email problems in the past where they listed their SMTP server as mx.theirdomain.com in Outlook, per the instructions of their mail host. On their workstations, this worked sporadically. Sometimes it would work for days, then it would stop, then start again. I ended up just using their ISP’s SMTP server name. They also had problems getting to their web mail (especially when they were sitting on the server itself, which is something I’m trying to get them to stop doing anyway…using their sever as a workstation) and my solution to that was to put a static entry in their hosts file directing the web mail site to a specific IP. Incidentally I couldn’t ping that IP from inside their building, so I had to get someone to ping it from outside the building. I thought the reason for that was because the server name was causing problems.
Essentially I have tried to convince the customer that they ought to change their server name, but I haven’t been able to articulate WHY very well. Am I even on the right track or should I just leave things the way they are?
They’ve had email problems in the past where they listed their SMTP server as mx.theirdomain.com in Outlook, per the instructions of their mail host. On their workstations, this worked sporadically. Sometimes it would work for days, then it would stop, then start again. I ended up just using their ISP’s SMTP server name. They also had problems getting to their web mail (especially when they were sitting on the server itself, which is something I’m trying to get them to stop doing anyway…using their sever as a workstation) and my solution to that was to put a static entry in their hosts file directing the web mail site to a specific IP. Incidentally I couldn’t ping that IP from inside their building, so I had to get someone to ping it from outside the building. I thought the reason for that was because the server name was causing problems.
Essentially I have tried to convince the customer that they ought to change their server name, but I haven’t been able to articulate WHY very well. Am I even on the right track or should I just leave things the way they are?
![[noevil]](/data/assets/smilies/noevil.gif "[noevil] [noevil]")