Two Scalix servers - identical hostnames?

[elliot01]

Hi all,

I have two servers at a data centre (both CentOS v5.3).
10.11.254.250 mail1.mydomain.local
10.11.254.251 mail2.mydomain.local

mail1 runs the Scalix email system.

What I am trying to do is install Scalix onto mail2 as a backup server. The idea being that every night I just rsync my mailstore from mail1 to mail2. In the event of mail1 dieing, I switch the IP and hostname of mail2 to reflect mail1's details, reboot and kazzam!

My problem though, is that Scalix ties itself to your hostname on many levels, so installing it as-is onto mail2 and just copying a Scalix mailstore from mail1 to mail2 renders it unusable.

The best solution I can think of would be to temporarily change the hostname of mail2 to 'mail1' in order to do the Scalix install.

My concern is what network issues will occur if both servers have identical hostnames. I would leave the IP addresses unique (ie: unchanged) and my DNS server will still explicitly point x.x.x.250 to mail1 and x.x.x.251 to mail2, but I am still worried that this hostname clash will knock both servers off the network. As these servers are located a far distance away at a data centre, this could cause me a major dilemma!

Can anyone advise if they think I will create major problems by doing this? Has anyone succesdfully done something similar?

Thanks in advance!

[smpoole7]

In the Wiki, there's an article about "high availability." Take a look at that, it'll get you started.

One of the VARs or Scalix employees could speak to this more accurately, but I believe the commercial versions of Scalix are better suited for this sort of thing.

[elliot01]

Hi smpoole7,

Thank you very much for posting. I was quite sure I'd worked through most of the Wiki pages by now, but I'll take another look at that.

I guess my main query is more of a linux networking issue than Scalix though.

Best Regards,