Managing an Internet outage

[Robert Spangler]

On Sunday 11 May 2008 15:31, Mike Diggins wrote:

>  We occasionally have a situation where our Internet access is completely
>  down. My Manager has asked about the viability of locating a DNS server
>  off site, and during a situation when we're down, modifying it so that it
>  resolves my entire domain to a single IP address. Web users would be
>  redirected to that address, and a web page would explain we're off line.

OK, I don't know what your business is but if your Internet connection is 
'occasionally' going down then it's time you started looking for a better 
provider.  Depending on your business anything under 5 9's is unacceptable.

Here is another idea.  Move the servers that cannot be down off site.  There 
are plenty of datacenters that provide 99.999% uptime.

>  Our DNS TTL is set to 1 hour, however, I'm concerned that sites might
>  cache that address for longer than the TTL, and affect things such as mail
>  delivery beyond the outage. Does anyone have an opinion on this plan?
>  Obviously improving our redundancy is a better solution, and that will
>  come in time. Right now this seems like a quick and easy (dirty) solution.

If you know that your datacenter is going down more often then it should set 
your TTL's a lot lower.


-- 

Regards
Robert

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