Redundant servers ???

[Jim Reid]

>>>>> "Barry" == Barry Margolin <barmar at bbnplanet.com> writes:

    Barry> In article <199908202006.QAA07011 at www.fsproduce.com>, Bennett Samowich <brs at fsproduce.com> wrote:
    >> I read somewhere, I can't remember where, about creating two
    >> primary DNS server and using rsync to keep them identical.
    >> 
    >> Is this more reliable than having one server pass the
    >> information {master|slave} to the other.

    Barry> I don't see why this would be more reliable.  It's just a
    Barry> different way to keep the servers in sync.

    Barry> It means you'll have to do extra work to get it going.  DNS
    Barry> already provides automatic synchronization via zone
    Barry> transfers, periodic refreshes and the NOTIFY protocol, and
    Barry> you'll need to replicate that functionality in your rsync
    Barry> mechanism.

In fact it's worse than that. You have to go through all sorts of
contortions to try to switch *off* those mechanisms if you're using
something like rsync to keep the server contents sychronised. For
instance primary server #1 won't be too happy at getting a NOTIFY from
primary server #2 when it loads a new copy of the zone.