Solved Advice on NameServer/DNS setup

Daniel_Dog

Daniel_Dog

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Nov 16, 2019
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Hello everyone,

I recently got a dedicated server and installed Proxmox VE 8 on it so that I can host (almost all) my VMs/VPSes myself instead of renting a VPS for every host I need.

My current VPS setup looks like:
- main VPS in Nuremberg (Germany) that host all the websites itself. (It does not do NS for the websites it hosts as no NS record points to this server.)
- 3 NS servers located in Germany, United Kingdom and United States.

So my question is what configuration would be best to use for reliabilty and stability with the new dedicated server.
My current setup splits the NS/DNS into 3 DA installs and are linked via Multi-Server for the DNS transfer from the main DA VPS.

I was thinking to reduce the NameServers to 2 total instead of the 3 total now.
I am also thinking of recombining the main VM/VPS to do both websites and NS/DNS.

I originally got 3 NS servers to pretty much guarantee a 100% uptime for the NS/DNS since if all NS servers would be down, it is al royal pain in the *** to get everthing to resolve correctly again. (Thanks but no thanks to DNS caching)
But given that DirectAdmin only supports 2 default NameServers out of the box and only allow 3 or more NameServers by default via an additional config file, I would assume that having just 2 NameServers is the norm rather then the exception?

100% uptime of the NS/DNS is the goal but I also feel like having more then 2 NS/DNS servers that are geographic saparated is going beond the point of deminishing returns.
So that is why I am asking advice and would love to here everones options and reasons for a reliable and stable NS/DNS configuration.
 
We normally use Multi server setup between 2 servers, only 2 nameservers, we don't do customisation for DNS if it's not supported out of the box so no 3rd nameserver.

You could think of setting up a PowerDNS server, however, that could go down too, but maybe works better than multi-server setup, I don't know because I never used PowerDNS until now.

So we do like you do, from 2 servers we switch the multi-server setup from their ip's having ns1 and ns2 this way, works perfectly.

Now we have some others servers, one is probably temporarily so we don't want to switch those too with multi server setup. So we decided to use the ns1 on the server itself and use a VPS with Directslave as NS2.
This is also working fine, most of the time. However, DS is not a perfect solution, sometimes in some cases the SOA numbers are not the same as from the master server, if you did several DNS changes in short time.

Probably then multi server setup or powerdns is a better solution.
 
my experience - 95% servers didn't have separate NS at all, no matter 1 or 2000 websites on it. So just us scheme that fits your SLA, you can use two proxmox servers in separate DCs with additional HDD to keep backups cross-server/DC for fast restoring in separate DCs etc.
 
Thanks for your insights.

For anyone who wants to know what I ended up doing or who might stumble upon this thread with the same question:
I decided to go back to just having 2 DirectAdmin VMs/VPSes.
Given that I prefer to use a good normal standard setup instead of having a lot of redundancy that makes everything really complex if anything brakes, I decided to change to just one DirectAdmin VM that works as both the website host and NameServer and have a second VM somewhere else in the world as a procaution/NameServer redundancy.
 
That seems a very good solution to me, it's also always easy to copy over all dns records with the cli command if necessary.
 
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