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Distributed DNS?

N

nanaki333

Diamond Member
Not sure where to post this, but here goes.

Lets say I have 2 internet connections. 1 cable 1 DSL. Both with static IPs. I have them both plugged into a router that accepts 2 connections and does load balancing and what not. Each connection obviously has a different IP.

I have e-mail hosted on a server, along with web and everything else. That's all on 1 IP. If that connection goes down, I want everything to go out on the cable connection. Which will obviously happen when the router sees the connection is bad on the DSL.

Here's the thing. I want my domain name to point to the new IP almost immediately when it goes down. Distributed DNS seems like what I want. A site hosts your DNS and you change your IP on there manually and it immediately updates your new IP. What I want is something that will say, ping x.x.x.1 every few minutes to see if it's up. If it sees that it's down, it will automatically update my IP to x.x.x.2 for me. And when it sees that x.x.x.1 comes back online, it'll move back over to that one.

Does anybody know of a service that does this type of thing or am I living in a dream world?
 
a script could do that (such as bash, or perl)

You also may want to look into nagios to monitor your servers/services. You can have it message you when it goes down.
 
Well, yeah. I'm just trying to get something to do all that for me. I'd like it to message me when a line goes down, but I'd also like it to automatically switch over to the active line. Then switch again when it comes back. There has to be a service like that. I don't care what the cost is. Coming out of the company's pockets, not mine. 🙂

Thanks for the reply.
 
look into nagios to monitor your servers, I have only used it a little, but it has some cool stuff in it.
 
It may be easiest if you could get a router w/ 3 interfaces:
int1: the interface for your own network, w/ your own PUBLIC, routable IP
int2: ISP1's IP
int3: ISP2's IP

This way, you're (almost) guaranteed to have true redundency w/o having to worry about DNS issues. To have someone else do DNS for you, it'll always take time for the provider to propagate DNS, no matter what their sales guy tells you.
 
Uh ... how is a router with multiple IP addresses hooked to it going to help with incoming E-Mail?

The correct answer was: Setup your DNS host with multiple MX records. (reference: http://www.rscott.org/dns/mx.html )

Edit:

That still doesn't help with incoming web access, I am uncertain as to the effect of incoming http connections and multiple IP's for one A record of a domain name.
 
The point of having multiple WAN interfaces is to have redundent pipe to the Internet.
To all the users on the Internet, there are 2 routes to the web, email, and whatever service that they want to host on their network. No need to create multiple MX records because there's only 1 DNS record for each service. (unless they want to point to a provider for backup purpose)
 
... so if blah.com resolves to 1.1.1.1 and it's hitting your router with 3 interfaces, when 1.1.1.1 goes down, everything magically starts pointing to 1.1.1.2 because it's up?
 
You didn't mention who is doing your DNS service but if they support dynamic dns then you simply need to find out how they support it. I've used zoneedit before and their system is very easy to script for. see here
 
so if blah.com resolves to 1.1.1.1 and it's hitting your router with 3 interfaces, when 1.1.1.1 goes down, everything magically starts pointing to 1.1.1.2 because it's up?
Click to expand...
I believe you misunderstood how my option works, (or I didn't explain it well).

3 interfaces on a router:
eth0: 1.1.1.1
s0: 2.2.2.2
s1: 3.3.3.3

All three IP's are routable on the Internet. (assuming you get an IP space of 1.1.1.0)

If either of the serial interfaces goes down, people can still get to your network, 1.1.1.0.
The DNS of the servers resolve to 1.1.1.x, not 2.2.2.2 or 3.3.3.3.

If, however, your ethernet interface goes down, it doesn't matter how many WAN links you have, nobody can get to your site.
 
So this router with your two interfaces for outbound connections (i.e. cable on one, dsl on the other) and your world IP for your LAN, where do you get this IP from.
 
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