Stupid Newbie DNS question (self hosting domains) [repost]

[Kevin Darcy]

You are required to have 2 nameservers. This is for redundancy. The rest of the Internet
shouldn't have to put up with retransmissions to your nameservers just because one of your
machines hiccups for a few minutes or a few hours. Because the underlying reason is
redundancy, obviously they're not going to let you evade this requirement by having 2
different nameservers point to the same IP address.

Beyond that, however, most registrars don't really care much about how you meet the
2-distinct-nameserver requirement. You can host both nameservers, you can get somebody else
to run both nameservers, or you can have a mixture of your nameserver(s) and someone else's
nameserver(s). I would recommend, however, that your nameservice as a whole be as
topologically diverse as possible, if you care about robustness; even if none of your
nameservers are a Single Point of Failure, if they're all on the same segment/subnet, then
maybe a hub, switch, router or circuit is a Single Point of Failure instead.

As for "releas[ing] a domain to itself", I'm not quite sure what they are getting at there.
It is certainly possible to have, e.g. blahblah.com delegated exclusively to nameservers
whose names are themselves in the blahblah.com domain, e.g. ns1.blahblah.com and
ns2.blahblah.com. That's what "glue records" are for, after all. It's possible that the co.uk
registry has different rules, but I doubt it. If that's what your hosting company is saying,
then they're probably trying to drum up some "secondary service" business from you, or,
alternatively, they may be just plain ignorant.


- Kevin

Lee Jackson wrote:

> [Sorry if this is posted twice but my newserver doesnt appear to have posted it]
>
> Hi, sorry this is going to be a STUPID question but I'm going to ask it anways. Please
> feel free to point me to a FAQ or alternate newsgroup if appropriate.
>
> I finally purchased my own domain name and am trying to set up the name server/internic
> record for it so that the names servers are under my control.
>
> What I want to do is get the internic record pointing to my own nameserver but I only have
> 1 ip address so Im told I cant set up the record as
>
> ns.blahblah.co.uk       62.4.56.8
> ns1.blahblah.co.uk      62.4.56.8
>
> Now I can understand this and I assume I have been told correctly in this regards however
> the note from the hosting company has me somewhat confused :-
>
> "You cannot release a domain name to itself. The ns.blahblah.co.uk DNS
> server does not exist neither does ns1.blahblah.co.uk further more a
> primary and secondary nameserver can not have the same IP address."
>
> Now I DO have my own nameserver (of course) but from the above I take it to mean that I
> couldnt set up the internic record as :-
>
> ns.blahblah.co.uk       62.4.56.8
> ns1.blahblah.co.uk      62.4.56.9
>
> and would instead have to set it up as
>
> ns.someoneelesesnameserver.co.uk        <whatever address of the existing name server>
> ns1.blahblah.co.uk      62.4.56.9
>
> Or alternatively that without 2 ip address's its impossible to have and administer ones
> own DNS....
>
> Now the above just doesnt sound right but I dont know enough about DNS issues to judge for
> myself.
>
> Can anyone give me just a tad more information here and point me to some easy reading
> material that covers what Im trying to do?
>
> Many thanks
>
> Lee
> ..