[TriLUG] hosting your own DNS

[Aaron Joyner]

Alan Porter wrote:

>
> In other words, I wonder what Aaron's up to this afternoon?
>
> Alan    :-)


He's been a bit busy lately.  :)  The short answer, Chris, is don't do 
it yourself unless you're confident you know what you're doing.  
Presuming of course that your business depends on it, that is.  You're 
not going to be able to modify the dyndns NS records, as far as I'm 
aware.  Even if you could, that would only buy you the ability to 
survive a catastrophic dyndns failure, it wouldn't let you update the 
records in any more convenient fashion.  I'd also suggest that having 
dyndns host your DNS for you isn't the most reliable thing for your 
uptime either, honestly.

I'd suggest that if you want to have direct and relatively immediate 
control over the records from a BIND server, yet still have sufficient 
reliability, you should setup a local BIND server on a static IP on a 
link you control.  This link does not have to be 100% reliable, although 
it wouldn't hurt.  Then pay someone to do secondary DNS service for 
you.  Your ISP, various other folks on the Internet, etc may be able to 
do this for you.  It shouldn't cost much, on the order of a few bucks a 
month, tops.  They should provide you with 2-4 servers which will slave 
to your primary server, essentially scraping the data from it when ever 
you update it (and periodically to ensure things are in sync), and serve 
it from a reliable location.

Note that this gives you more power.  With great power, comes great... 
yeah you know the schpeil.  You'll have the complete ability to quickly 
and easily take your company's website off line for long periods of time 
(think, days, weeks) with a bad misconfiguration.

If you have more questions about this, feel free to ask,
Aaron S. Joyner