OT: DNS Zone policy and hidden masters (was: Re: OT?: Emailing from within filepro)

[Bill Campbell]

On Sat, May 29, 2004, Jay R. Ashworth wrote:
>On Sat, May 29, 2004 at 02:00:07PM -0400, Fairlight wrote:
>> I won't get into putting a primary nameserver on DSL.  Well, yes I will,
>> since DSL has absolutely zero guarantee of service under FCC regulations.
>> Doesn't matter what your contract with the telco says--under regs, they
>> don't have to fix it, you don't have any recourse if they don't.  This
>> means that if you want one on your side of the demarcation point, it
>> should be the secondary, not the primary, as that way at least the primary
>> would always be active and you'd have less delay.  As it happens, this
>> wouldn't normally cause much of a problem, as the system is designed to
>> have secondaries for a reason.
>
>Actually, the sugested solution to this problem is to tell the world
>your ISP's NS is your primary (list it first), but tell that server
>it's a slave -- to your "real" "hidden" master server behind the DSL
>line.  If your zone expire time is long enough, and both servers do
>NOTIFY, this gets you the best of both worlds.

This assumes that (a) your ISP agrees to do this, and (b) has enough of a
clue to implement it properly, neither of which are all that common these
days.  There are registrars that provide DNS services that allow you to
update your own DNS on their servers with a web interface.

We provide DNS services for a number of domains, at least one of which
simply sends me e-mail messages asking for the changes.  Most of our
customers are running djbdns on their own servers, updating our secondary
records here via rsync restricted to their domain directory and IP address
of their server.  We then propagate all our DNS our four authoritative
servers, again using rsync for the transfers.

Bill
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