Bandwidth usage of a DNS server?

[walter.m.cekala at census.gov]

Brad,

      I don't want to get off topic before addressing your concerns;
however, it sounds like all of your sites are on a single server.  If you
follow this group, you should know that you ought to have at least two DNS
servers and that they should be on different networks with separate power
sources....  If you have only one communications line coming in to your
data center, that could be an issue.   Most likely they have more; however,
you don't mention the relationship between the data center and your ISP.

      By taking a look at the traffic to your sites using your server logs,
you can get an idea of how much additional traffic the DNS servers will
require.  That should be minimal (one response per query?) if you limit
your zone transfers; however, as you can see, there may be more of an issue
that just bandwidth.  If your data center offers the redundancy and
reliability you need with communications and power, perhaps you can easily
accomplish this by adding just two servers.  Since you are trying to save
rack space and I suppose server costs, you might put your secondary DNS on
the platform with the web server.

            Good luck,

            Walter Cekala
            Walter at Cekala.com



                                                                                                                                             
                      "Bradley C. Goldsmith"                                                                                                 
                      <brad at _nospam_blacksheepsoftw        To:       comp-protocols-dns-bind at isc.org                                         
                      are.com.au>                          cc:                                                                               
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                      12/27/2002 01:52 AM                                                                                                    
                                                                                                                                             
                                                                                                                                             






Hi All,

             My firm has a linux server housed in a data centre which has
several
 sites being hosted on it. At present, we use our upstream isp's DNS
server for our hosted domains.

             As we add more sites, its becoming more of a pain to organise
for the
pstream isp to make DNS changes for us (as it is done via a phone call).
So, the natural progression here is to think about hosting our own DNS
server.

             Not having any practical experience in this regard, I would
just like
get an idea of how much bandwidth I would expect a DNS service to consume
when hosting domain records for a couple hundred websites.

             Also, are there any disadvantages (besides redundancy etc) on
hosting the primary nameserver on the same box as the webserver to
minimise rackspace?

             Thanks in advance.

Cheers,
Brad