using DA for slave nameservers

[thoroughfare]

Hi,

I have a reseller account with my hosting company, and I have accounts spread across two servers.

I want to be able to add some kind of redundancy for emails to my customers, so that if their server goes down, the emails are sent to a secondary MX record and stored until the server is backup.

To do this, I would need some nameservers that aren't on the primary server, otherwise when the server went down, so would the nameservers.

I wondered if it is possible to put all my accounts on one server, and use the BIND service on that primary server as my first nameserver (ns1), and then setup my account on the second server so that it was only used as a slave nameserver. Is this possible?

I was then going to add extra MX records to the DNS settings for all my domains, which would point to a third DA server, with my accounts setup only so that they can handle emails. I figured I could run some kind of Cron job on the mail server that checks to see if any email has arrived (therefore the primary server is down) and then ping the main server every 30 mins or so, until it comes backup, and then I'd get the mail server to send all the emails over to the primary server.

Is this possible? I'm quite competent in PHP and Perl, for any syncing/API interaction required.

Any help gratefully appreciated,
Matt

 

[nobaloney]

Sure it's possible, and many of us do it all the time.

We run slave (secondary is a deprecated term) DNS and backup MX on a server we have for just that purpose, halfway across the country from us.

The slave DNS server actually serves much of our DNS, since it's closer to many of the people browsing our sites (and therefore it's often faster as well; DNS uses the records from the first nameserver to respond).

The server only accepts email when the primary mailservers for the particular domain are not running, which isn't often. Then the mail is automagically held until the server comes back online; then it's delivered to the proper server.

While you probably don't have enough control as a reseller to do this all yourself, and may need to find commercial or tradeout services, I'll point out some references here:

The bind-users email list:
http://www.isc.org/services/public/lists/bind-lists.html

The exim-users email list:
http://www.exim.org/maillist.html

Hope some of this helps.

Jeff

 

[thoroughfare]

Thanks Jeff.

I was aware it was possible, and I've used ZoneEdit before to do such a job, but it was whether it was possible to do it in DA as a reseller that I was kinda wondering... guess not though.

I might use a spare terminal on my home network to do it... I have cable. I'd run RedHat, how do I setup it up though to store emails and then send them back (I have RH8 on the other partition of this machine but I'm still learning).

Thanks,
Matt

 

[nobaloney]

Matt, I've got generic instructions at home; please send me an email to remind me, and if I have time tonight I'll find them for you.

I'm very busy right now; I'm bringing up a new reseller server tonight, so I may not have time to do it before the weekend, though .

I have every intention of setting up a "white-paper" site on my nobaloney.net website but I haven't had time yet.

Jeff