Round-Robin for mail/smtp hosts

[Matt Prigge]

> When you say "checking" mail, though, this implies remote access to a
mailbox,
> via POP or IMAP or whatever. In DNS terms, this doesn't matter, but in
mail
> terms you of course need to make sure that those mailboxes are shared
properly
> on the various server(s) included in that round-robin name, and can handle
> potential conflicts, e.g. being updated in incompatible ways on two
different
> nodes simultaneously.

Right. The two machines that would be set up this way are POP/IMAP proxies
which dynamically redirect traffic to a distributed set of backend servers,
so this isnt a problem in this case.

What I am most curious about is how the clients (OE/Netscape/etc) implement
failover using multi-A RRsets. Is it handled by the underlying OS? Or is it
the client really responsible for trying the first RR and then, if that
fails, trying subsequent RRs out of the same set? Do some clients not do
this?  This scheme seems like it will work well as a low-grade form of load
balancing, but how well will it work as far as redundancy is concerned?

-matt