[PLUG] Bind behavior...

[plug_0 at robinson-west.com]

My impression, someone please step in and correct me if I am wrong, is that
bind 9.3 is supposed to hand out your mail exchanger records in order and
not shuffle them.

My brother and I are attempting to be backup mail exchanger sites for each
other and waddya know, we are finding that mail to site A ends up trying to
go through site B even when A is still up.

So we have...

foo.com. MX 30 mail.bar.com
foo.com. MX 20 mail2.foo.com
foo.com. MX 10 mail1.foo.com

at one site ( The domains aren't really foo and bar. )

And

bar.com. MX 30 mail2.foo.com
bar.com. MX 20 mail1.foo.com
bar.com. MX 10 mail1.bar.com

at the other site.

Now, our theory going in for someone trying to email a person on say foo
is that their ISP's mail server won't go to bar unless foo is down.
Apparently, our bind servers hand out the mail exchangers in shuffled
order.  I guess the weights are included with this list, but they seem
to be getting ignored wholesale.  Is there some way to disable shuffling
in bind 9?  Is it possible to get the average smtp server out on the
Internet to use the mail exhangers for a particular domain in order?

Can a specific order be enforced when it comes to which mail excahnger for
a particular domain gets tried first, second,...?

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