Need help with an idea, forward dns queries in order to test new environment

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rndinit0

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I've got a DA server in NYC, and I'd like to move it to the UK.
So I was thinking Admin Backup and transfer...

However I was worried about the new environment being stable enough.
So my and a friend discussed this, and we thought:

Well why don't we forward all requests to ns1.daserver.com and ns2.daserver.com to the IP's of the UK Directadmin Server nameserver IP's.

If things looked ugly, we could just disable that and remain where we are and cancel our service in the UK.

The benefit is, no money lost, no angry customers either in case things dont work out.

Now here is the part I need help with.

1.) Can you think of a better way to do this?
2.) How would I configure my current NYC NameServers to forward everything to the UK NameServers?
3.) Any other relevant thoughts you might have?

Your probably wondering why are we being so paranoid? Mainly because not only are we moving geographic location but also from a dedicated box to vertically and horizontally scalable vps service. Since we've never done this before were being as careful as we could be.
 
What you want to do is move everything in one step, and possibly go back in one step. That's the easy solution, and when I say easy I don't mean fast, reliable or suggested. It's not fast, because DNS works with caching, so there is no "pull back! pull back!" like in the movies, if it goes bad it goes bad for a relatively long time.

You can do what you are thinking, either by re-routing and NATting the traffic to the US nameservers towards the UK ones, or by creating a backup of all zones, removing them from US side and setting up MultiServer, or by setting up a NS-only zone for every domain on the US side pointing to the UK nameservers, and many other ways... but that's not what I would do.

If you really are trying to avoid problems move one application or subdomain or domain at a time, slowly and by carefully checking that all is working fine at peaks time, for each application or subdomain or domain. It's slow, it's painful but it makes much more sense.
 
Moving them one by one, would mean that the UK name servers would have to be named dns1.daserver.com and dns2.daserver.com, cause the us servers are named ns1 and ns2.
Im trying to avoid that, but i guess thats one of doing it, but also ill be paying double for that month or two that I try this. But I do like the risk mitigation, and the cost is not exactly a major concern when I evaluate the cost of a horrible rep and permament loss of customers.
 
That's my point exactly, we often look at the costs of a long migration and underestimate the costs of a disaster recovery.

Also, I find the nameservers naming convention very annoying and useless. On my servers I always use nsX.servername.domain.tld (for single-server nameservers) or directly servername.domain.tld, another good choice is nsX.city.state.country.domain.tld (with or without city and state, depending on the number of servers).
Also, if you have ns1, ns2 and ns3 in the same city, and you have to shut down ns1... there is absolutely no sense on shifting the name of the other two. This enables you, for example, to create ns3 and ns4 in UK and shut down ns1 and ns2 in US when needed... who cares if your nameservers names start with ns3?
 
Tillo: all valid points, I just dont like ns3 personally *grins* but i guess its a small price to pay eh? Ill consider this topic solved/closed. Thank you all for participating in this tiny discussion.
 
And just when I was about to add that forwarding DNS requests seems like a valid idea to me. Just make sure that you've got TTL on both servers set for a short time frame; we use 600.

Jeff
 
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