Mirrors, proxies, third-level DNS's, secondary servers...

Purdy on 2002-02-14T15:52:58

I'm slowly mounting stuff on my plate that I need to learn, to take our company into the next century. Right now, we have one small simple Web server co-lo'd up in New York somewhere (we're in North Carolina). When something happens to either the server or the ISP up there, we have no recourse and our visitors cannot get to us.

My manager doesn't want to see that happen again, so I need to learn/grok how to set up a secondary server somewhere (prolly w/ another ISP) that can accept the traffic when the primary server is down.

Does this make sense? Can anyone point me to a resource to learn more?

Thanks,

Jason

Update: Oh, and I don't know how third-level domain names (instead of WWW, something like 'rt' (.mysite.com)) work - we don't provide our own DNS (we let our ISP handle that nightmare)... do they need to do this?


dns goop

lachoy on 2002-02-14T16:38:46

IIRC (it's been a while), but each 'third-level' domain is just another host with its own A (address) or CNAME (alias to an A) record -- www.mysite.com, mail.mysite.com, use.mysite.com, etc. The folks who maintain your DNS definitely need to do this for you as it's all part of the same hostfile.

Re:dns goop

Purdy on 2002-02-14T16:53:25

Hmm ... ok. That answers one of my questions. My punk-ish ISP folks charge me $50/DNS entry/year ... not sure if a third-level is worth that (yet). I was trying to install RT and it wants its own virtual domain in your httpd.conf file... I tried with an Alias and Location tag in the httpd.conf, but that didn't seem to work.

Jason

Re:dns goop

lachoy on 2002-02-14T18:01:24

$50 per domain or $50 per DNS entry? The latter is highway robbery, IMO. Changing the zone takes on the order of 60 seconds even for a slow typist, and zones are changed very rarely. If so you should look into another service: maybe even the (super cool perl supporters) DynDNS. It seems like the Custom DNS service lets you admin your zone from the web. Tres cool.

Re:dns goop

Purdy on 2002-02-14T20:16:04

Well, per domain, but I bet if I ask 'em for a third-level entry, they'll charge me another $50. Haven't asked 'em yet, tho. I'll check out DynDNS - Thanks!

Also, I went to B&N and grabbed wrox's Professional Apache which answered my question about the backup server: setup DNS on the web server and if it fails, have the second DNS point to the second web server.

Hmmm ... I've got a lot to learn...

Jason

Re:dns goop

triv on 2002-02-20T04:12:20

Yeah, Custom DNS is what you want. All writen in supper yummy mod_perl modules (c:

# /me laughs evilly
DynDNS::User->new($luser)->delete;