Adam Bower wrote:
On Mon, Nov 19, 2007 at 11:48:15AM +0000, Mark Rogers wrote:
configuration. Not least because as a tertiary server it won't normally matter if I get it wrong :-)
Yes, it will matter. With DNS the secondary doesn't mean "if you can't get to the first use this instead"
I was thinking more about the "I've completely broken it" scenario where it isn't available at all, but I take your point.
it is just bad terminology as you (generally) have a "master" where all the changes are made and the "slaves" grab this information (usually using AXFR queries) to transfer the changes made to the zones to themselves.
As far as I can tell, AXFR isn't an option with 123-reg.
You could run another server for the domain that doesn't pull the zone from the "master" but this could lead to changes getting out of sync and as you can never tell which server the clients are going to speak to this will eventually cause problems.
I have considered running MyDNS and writing a script to periodically (at least once per TTL) pull information from the 123-Reg DNS to keep it up to date. The lack of AXFR means that I will have to know which hosts to request, however, and since as you point out this won;t in reality be just an emergency DNS, but will be used routinely, it does need to cover everything.
I wondered about running a standard DNS caching proxy; hopefully it would get enough hits in normal use to maintain a reasonably up-to-date cache, with any requests it didn't know getting thrown at 123-Reg. I'm not sure whether this one is possible though (in particular I need TTLs to be ignored if the primary DNS is unavailable). This one seems the best bet due to the problem of keeping the server up to date in normal use, if I can make it work at all.
Another option is to move all my DNS somewhere else which does support AXFR, or move it all to my own servers so AXFR isn't an issue. However whilst I don't mind providing a backup I don't really want to take primary responsibility (as mentioned before I don't know enough yet to be doing that).
Your other option is to ask 123 if you can setup another server that you control and see if they will let you sync the dns from their machines to it.
I will ask them but I think I know the answer!