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How to setup DNS failover/redundant DNS?
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How to setup DNS failover/redundant DNS?

FreekFreek Member
edited November 2012 in Help

A friend of mine has his email hosted elsewhere (Hosted Exchange) but his DNS and Website are hosted on the same server. Lately there was an outage of his webserver, and you as you by now already would have guessed, his mail was unavailable due to this outage as well. The only way to solve this is to host his DNS elsewhere. If possible he wants to have some kind of DNS failover or redundant DNS, or as he would say: don't put all eggs in one basket.
Since there are so many free DNS providers our there, I assumed this would be common practice and quite easy to do. However, I don't seem to be finding much tutorials or how to's on doing so. The only one I found was this one
http://hostingfu.com/article/redundant-and-free-domain-name-service-editdns-everydns
Sadly It's a bit outdated but the principle remains the same (I guess).
First, what DNS providers would you guys recommend for the situation I am trying to achieve? I was thinking of ClouDNS.net and Namecheap perhaps? Cloudflare's Twitter doesn't make me too happy, seeing al those outages lately..
Second, do you guys have any other tutorials/how to on how to setup a failover/redundant DNS?

Thanks!

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Comments

  • If your prepared to pay a bit then I can highly recommend http://www.dnsmadeeasy.com and I'm sure others here can vouch for the service. We're using there DNS Failover and have had no issues to date

  • DomainBopDomainBop Member
    edited November 2012

    I would recommend getting 2 or 3 (1 master dns server and 1 to 2 slave) low end VPS in different data centers with 512MB memory each and using PowerDNS for the dns software and PowerAdmin to administer the names (PowerAdmin is installed on the master nameserver only). PowerDNS is less resource intensive than bind, scales better, and is more secure.

    Here's some tutorials on how to set up a master/slave DNS with powerdns and poweradmin :
    http://www.howtoforge.com/installing-powerdns-with-mysql-backend-and-poweradmin-on-debian-squeeze
    http://www.debiantutorials.com/installing-powerdns-as-supermaster-with-slaves/
    http://chenyufei.info/blog/2010-12-19/powerdns-setup-on-debian-lenny-using-bind-or-sqlite3-backend/
    http://linuxmanage.com/master-slave-powerdns-managed-by-poweradmin.html

    Thanked by 1ffquest
  • FreekFreek Member
    edited November 2012

    Thanks for the replies guys!

    @StormVZ said: If your prepared to pay a bit then I can highly recommend http://www.dnsmadeeasy.com and I'm sure others here can vouch for the service. We're using there DNS Failover and have had no issues to date

    Those prices are certainly no problem I guess. However, I'm reading mixed reviews regarding their support:
    http://www.dnsreviews.com/hosteddns/dns-made-easy_reviews/
    Have you used their support?

    @DomainBop said: I would recommend getting 2 or 3 (1 master dns server and 1 to 2 slave) low end VPS in different data centers

    If it was for myself, I would be doing this. However, this will be used in a production environment. Since I'm still a linux noob, I would rather not burn my hands on this solution and thus would like to have a more 'plug and play' like solution :) Thanks for the suggestion anyway !

    Thanked by 1srikanth131
  • Or setup your server with cloudflare. Use there DNS. cache the site via cloudflare if you like.

  • Awmusic12635Awmusic12635 Member, Host Rep

    Rage4 with uptimeRobot Integrated?

  • @Freek said: Those prices are certainly no problem I guess. However, I'm reading mixed reviews regarding their support:

    http://www.dnsreviews.com/hosteddns/dns-made-easy_reviews/
    Have you used their support?

    Recent reviews look good to me there, I've never had to use there support as I've came across no issues and have a wide range of guides in there knowledge base and they also are pretty active on Twitter so would assume it's quick

  • @geekalot said: Cheap or Free DNS Hosting Options

    Already found those:
    http://www.lowendtalk.com/wiki/free-dns-providers
    But that doesn't answer my question...

    @Mun said: Or setup your server with cloudflare. Use there DNS. cache the site via cloudflare if you like.

    Cloudflare's Twitter doesn't make me too happy, seeing al those outages lately..

    @Fliphost said: Rage4 with uptimeRobot Integrated?

    Is that like a sort of Round Robin setup?

    @StormVZ said: Recent reviews look good to me there, I've never had to use there support as I've came across no issues and have a wide range of guides in there knowledge base and they also are pretty active on Twitter so would assume it's quick

    Thanks for your input. Do they also import your current DNS records like Cloudflare's setup does?

  • @Freek said: Do they also import your current DNS records like Cloudflare's setup does?

    They don't do it automatically but if you can export zone file from your current dns management then you can import that using http://help.dnsmadeeasy.com/domain/import-records-from-a-zone-file/

  • Awmusic12635Awmusic12635 Member, Host Rep

    @FreeK Rage4 uses anycast. They have their service integrated with Uptimerobot.

    For example, you can have if uptimerobot detects your site is down to switch the dns to another IP

  • @StormVZ said: They don't do it automatically but if you can export zone file from your current dns management then you can import that using http://help.dnsmadeeasy.com/domain/import-records-from-a-zone-file/

    Ok thanks for the input!

    @Zen said: Most DNS providers have these outages, they just aren't publicized so much. And are normally not effecting most people enough for it to be noticable.

    Alright, thanks. So you would recommend Cloudflare?
    How exactly does Cloudflare use an anycast DNS? If I ping or do a NS lookup for igor.ns.cloudflare.com I keep getting back the same IP. Or am I doing it wrong?

    @Fliphost said: @FreeK Rage4 uses anycast. They have their service integrated with Uptimerobot.

    For example, you can have if uptimerobot detects your site is down to switch the dns to another IP

    Thanks for the reply! Hmm, OK, but I don't quite understand how this works or should work. Website goes down, IP needs to be redirected to..?

  • @Zen said: A redundant server you have waiting, that's when you start to make an actual cluster.

    Ah, that won't be happening anytime soon. It's just to make sure the mail is still reachable in the event the webserver goes down :)

    @Zen said: Never needed Anycast or wanted it specifically and not sure if CF use it, but yes I recommend them, been nothing but good to me :)

    Ok, thanks for the input :) How exactly does Cloudflare have a failover if I only have 2 nameservers? Sorry for all the questions, just want to understand this correctly!

  • PatrickPatrick Member
    edited November 2012

    As far as I know CF doesn't do failover DNS so you could use a setup with CF like this:
    http://blog.booru.org/?p=12

  • @StormVZ said: As far as I know CF doesn't do failover DNS

    Nope but it is rather easy to implement yourself.

  • I personally have 8 DNS servers powered by cPanel DNS-Only. I've tried to spread them out with different providers/networks/datacentres. The smallest VPS is 192mb of RAM and the only service running is bind and cPanel, everything is disabled.

  • @gbshouse probably has some input on this subject.

  • @Freek said: Those prices are certainly no problem I guess. However, I'm reading mixed reviews regarding their support:

    http://www.dnsreviews.com/hosteddns/dns-made-easy_reviews/
    Have you used their support?

    Yes. Maybe twice in 5 years. Responses were quick and thorough. With dnsmadeeasy you're probably not going to be using support a lot as it just works....

    Having said that I'm moving away from them to a self-managed solution. 'Cause (1) I hate their web interface, and (2) I can't find any way to do mass changes like...

    update records set value='mx.newdomain.com.' where type='MX' and value='mx.olddomain.com.'

  • gbshousegbshouse Member, Host Rep

    With anycast DNS you have 2 NS records but in fact there are more servers in the background (Rage4 uses 15). They are announcing the same IP in different parts or world/network. Regarding UptimeRobot integration - it requires at least 2 servers so when our service is notified by UptimeRobot we switch the record to failover mode and it points to your backup server IP. Next release of Rage4 will include support for NewRelic and ScaleXtreme (and probably Nodeping).

  • You can sleep at night and not worry about taking care of extra machines, etc. and simply outsource the DNS hosting.

    1. NameCheap FREE dns hosting
    2. dnsmadeeasy.com
    3. Amazon Route 53. http://aws.amazon.com/route53/ ---I am using two domains now with them. I pay $0.50 each so my bill is $1.00 a month. :)
  • gbshousegbshouse Member, Host Rep

    There is difference between DNS failover and failover DNS :)
    In case of DNS failover you want to make sure that your DNS will be always available.
    In case of failover DNS you want to make sure that for ex. when one our your webservers it will be switched to backup one.

  • This domain registrar looks interesting and they have a pretty good looking anycast DNS service.. https://www.nameterrific.com/

  • @gbshouse said: In case of DNS failover you want to make sure that your DNS will be always available.

    This is what I'm looking for.
    So if I understand it correctly, Cloudflare does not have this. It only has an anycast DNS, which redirects users to the closest DNS to them, to reduce latency? And if I want DNS failover, I need to implement @StormVZ suggestion?

    @sleddog said: Yes. Maybe twice in 5 years. Responses were quick and thorough. With dnsmadeeasy you're probably not going to be using support a lot as it just works....

    Thanks, noted!

    @hdpixel said: You can sleep at night and not worry about taking care of extra machines, etc. and simply outsource the DNS hosting.

    Welcome to the topic. No hard feelings, but please re-read my OP and the posts already made in this topic.

  • gbshousegbshouse Member, Host Rep

    @Freek - Yes, CF is running anycast DNS which is enough secure (I'm not sure how many nodes do they have). With Rage4, beside anycast DNS you can use additional third party slave DNS servers (like HE.NET or Softlayer)

  • It's one thing to find a secondary DNS service, but making that service aware of new and removed domains is another. Adding and removing domains manually is not practical with a busy hosting server, particularly if you host resellers.

    So here's the deal; BIND does not have functionality for automatically adding and removing domains. It can update content for domains listed in the secondary server, but BIND can't update the domain list. That means that even if you host your own secondary DNS, you still have to either update your domain list manually or create a custom script to do it for you. For my service I did the latter.

  • @gbshouse said: @Freek - Yes, CF is running anycast DNS which is enough secure (I'm not sure how many nodes do they have). With Rage4, beside anycast DNS you can use additional third party slave DNS servers (like HE.NET or Softlayer)

    Thanks for the reply :)

    Could you please explain to me in layman terms what exactly is anycast DNS and in what way does it make my DNS more reliable, for example in an event that one nameserver goes down?
    Cloudflare has 2 nameservers and I still don't see how that can be redundant.
    I googled and I only seem to find marketing chitchat ('cloud', 'faster', 'innovation' yadayadayada) or deep tech talk (BIND, some standard etc).
    Thanks :)

    @ajonate said: but BIND can't update the domain list. That means that even if you host your own secondary DNS, you still have to either update your domain list manually or create a custom script to do it for you. For my service I did the latter.

    Okay, thanks did not know that !

  • @Freek said: Cloudflare has 2 nameservers and I still don't see how that can be redundant.

    Cloudflare may have many more than two nameservers. With Anycast, being advertised via 2 ip addresses is not the same as having two servers. For a marketing-free explanation, have a look here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anycast

  • gbshousegbshouse Member, Host Rep
    edited November 2012

    @Freek - imagine the same IP assigned to multiple servers across the globe, even if some of them died the rest is still available. The best server is picked by network point of view (usually the closest one from network point of view). You can read more here and here

  • Thanks guys for the explanations :) I know enough for now!
    Massive thanks again for helping me out!!

  • gsrdgrdghdgsrdgrdghd Member
    edited November 2012

    You can actually see the anycast happening here (thats the IP of dns2.cloudflare.com)

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