Dedicated DNS Servers

[kris1351]

In the past we have run our cPanel servers with 3 seperate DNSOnly servers. This allowed hosts to go down and it did not effect the DNS for other clients, just an extra step of redundancy I like.

What I would like to do is basically setup the same thing with DA. I have turned off the clustering from the old cPanel servers we are converting to DA. The DNS servers are being reloaded with BIND only. From my understanding reading here the best thing to do is to set the DNS servers up with master2slave with the master and 2 secondaries. Then each DA server will basically act as a slave syncing to the 3 real DNS servers.

Would it be best to set them up as 3 master servers and then have the DA servers as slaves or put them a 1 master and 2 secondaries? If anyone has set this up any pointers/advice/pitfalls would be welcome to speed up the progress of the project. I am hoping to have all of my servers moved off of cPanel in the next 30 days and not put any others on.

 

[nobaloney]

We contracted to have master2slave written for us with the idea that we'd use each DA server as master for it's own domains (that's easy; DA is built for that), and then our slaves slave all our DA servers.

We're doing that now and it works well.

The disadvantage is that if you need to move a site between servers the DNS server name has to be changed at the registrar.

So we're considering using each DA server as a hidden master and use two or more slave-only servers as public servers.

That works because DNS doesn't care if an authoritative server is a master or s slave.

In fact the authors of BIND say there's no such thing as a master or slave server, only master or slave zones.

Jeff

 

[kris1351]

That is why I do the 3 server setup on bind servers then allow the hosting servers to just add to them. DNS requires so little resources that small servers can run it well and having it dedicated and permanent makes changes easy amongst your users.

 

[kris1351]

dns1.domain.com - Bind Server
dns2.domain.com - Bind Server
dns3.domain.com - Bind Server (Remote Location)
da01.domain.com - DA Server
da02.domain.com - DA Server
da03.domain.com - DA Server

That is the picture I am attempting to setup. Like I said with the DNSOnly versions of cPanel it was very simple to just convert the DNS servers from Bind to their version of DNSOnly. I would like to take those back to Bind and keep all of the 6 current servers synced and the new ones coming on synced in the future. It is robust and worry free when you setup like this and you can move customers easily between servers is what I found with cPanel. Is master2slave the correct setup for this or do I need something more custom? If it is master2slave do I simply setup the masters on all 3 Bind servers then slave each DA server as I bring them up? I have yet to get it to sync properly in the test bed so asking for anyone that has experience with it to give me a little bit of their advice setting it up.

Jeff, have you done something similar? I am willing to pay for your time to assist.

 

[nobaloney]

If all the servers run DirectAdmin then the best way to do this is to use the DirectAdmin Multi Server Setup. If some of the servers aren't running DirectAdmin, then Master2Slave DNS Replicator will do what you want except that we've noticed duplicate issues when moving domains until the system has everything in sync again; this can take up to two cycles, during which duplicates won't be slaved.

If you attempt to use Master2Slave and it has problems we'll attempt to help you with them. Based on whether the problems are something unique to your implementation or something that would affect everyone we may or may not have to charge you. Please contact me at my email address below in my sig for more information.

Jeff