I have an internal SMTP relay at work and its DNS flips the IP address back
and forth every few minutes.  Example:

One minute it could be x.x.8.133

Next minute it could be x.x.72.138

(First two octets omitted to protect the guilty.)

I can reproduce the above result at will with simple pings.

I presume it is load balancing technique our network propeller-heads cooked
up.  But on our HP3000 host there is only one IP plugged into the HOSTS.NET
file.

(And of course the propeller-heads never told us this.)

Could it be causing SMTP errors on our HP3000?

To take it even further, if they take one of the two above relays down for
a bit of maintenance (say nightly), and it happens to be the one our HP3000
is using on its HOSTS.NET file, would that also cause SMTP errors?

And may I presume the HOSTS.NET file has only room for one IP address in
column 1?

-- 

Tracy Johnson
Old fashioned text games hosted below:
http://empire.openmpe.com/empire/
BT







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