National/International link

[Barry Margolin]

In article <9vda4r$iv1 at pub3.rc.vix.com>,
Cecilia Cabrera  <ccabrera at ccc.uba.ar> wrote:
>Hi, i've got a situation here that's been driving me nuts, hope you can
>give me some ideas.
>
>It goes like this: our LAN has an international link plus a national link.
>Whenever the international link goes down the DNS servers can't acces to
>the root servers and don't resolve the names out of his SOA
>(mydomain.ar and others.mydomain.ar). Figures.
>YET, since i do have a national link up i would like them to resolve the
>.ar domains. Specially since the load of so many "unresolvable" requests
>end up killing my servers until they can't even answer for mydomain.ar
>(quite a nuisance). 
>
>So, my root.zone has some entries for ar. but from what i've read i
>believe the named doesn't notice them, right? How can i teach him the
>ar. NSes regardless of the root nameservers? 

If any of the authoritative servers for .ar allows you to pull zone
transfers, you could configure your server as a slave.

Other than that, I don't see a good solution.  The problem is that the TTL
of the .ar NS records are only 1 hour.  Most TLDs have TTLs set to several
days, and if .fr were like this you would usually be able to use the cached
NS records while your international link is down.  Maybe you should contact
the Argentina NIC and find out why they've set the TTL so low.  It seems
unlikely that the NS records change very often, so there should be little
reason to reduce caching like this.

-- 
Barry Margolin, barmar at genuity.net
Genuity, Woburn, MA
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