Disaster Recovery

Followers of this blog will know that I help out the Hastings Musical Festival with their computer systems. We had a bit of a disaster today. With the opening day of the Festival only three days away, the main website went down. I notified the hosts of the fault and quickly put up a holding page.

Whilst waiting for the hosting company to fix the fault, I set about restoring a recent backup of the site to my in-house server and re-directing the domain (together with the associated paraphernalia such as editing DNS entries, both with the hosting company and on my own server).

As luck would have it, as soon as I'd got my temporary server up and running, the hosting company emailed me to say they had resolved the fault.

At least it gave me a good chance to implement and test my disaster recovery procedures.

Spam Email

Big problems with one of my clients, they are receiving thousands of spam emails per hour. Their ISP is not much use, nor is their web-host who is complaining about the volume of traffic.

I have set up a whitelist on their email server to dump everything except for legitimate email addresses, however their host is not able to do the same and is having to forward all of the messages to their ISP for collection.

There are four alternatives;

1. Change the customers domain name. This may be the only course of action to stop the influx, however will involve a fair amount of disruption to the customer.
2. Set up a free address with Google mail for example and point the hosts mx record to Google.
3. Set the mx record with their host to point to their internal mail server. This will most likely saturate their bandwidth and server.
4. Transfer the domain elsewhere, and point the DNS 'A' record (website) back to their original host.

I'm waiting for instructions from my customer and have asked them to make direct contact with the host.