[GLLUG] 3 websites, 1 IPaddress + backup server

[Rich Clark]

On Mon, 2 Feb 2004, Jeremy Bowers wrote:

> Hampton, Rodney wrote:
> > Agree with you Rich.  You _can_ cheat if you have 2 ip addresses.  In 
> > theory, you should have the authoritative primary and secondary DNS 
> > servers for your domain on different networks.  In practice you merely 
> > need to have 2 unique ip addresses and I've even run both ip addresses 
> > off the same box (though this is a really risky practice).  So you don't 
> > really need someone else to host the secondary authoritative DNS.
> 
> Some registrars are now accepting one IP address for DNS alone, I think, 
> but I'm not certain and I don't care to futz with my working setup on 
> Dotster to check ;-)
> 
> Another trick I've used before then (that's a recent development) is to 
> register two domain names. Each domain name gets a nameserver, 
> "ns1.domain.com" and "ns1.domain2.com", pointing at the same IP. Then, 
> for each domain, say the two nameservers are "ns1.domain.com" and 
> "ns1.domain2.com". Expensive unless you already own multiple (as I was), 
> but at least Dotster was only checking for two different name server 
> names, not actual IPs.
> 
> When your "domain" is only one IP anyhow, if the single DNS server goes 
> down, most likely the entire domain is down anyhow...

Ideally, what Rodney's said about having backup dns on a separate network 
in another location than your primary is simply basic fault tolerance 
planning; if one nameserver goes down, the whole network doesn't become 
unresolvable due to the outage.

In actuality, though, for the whole thing to work, only one nameserver
needs to be identified as authoritative for any given zone.  Registrars
ask for more than one nameserver to help promote failure tolerance;
however, if you only provide one nameserver, things will work.

Rich
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