[ale] Preferred domain registrars?

[Ben Coleman]

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On 1/22/2010 4:32 PM, Paul Cartwright wrote:
> On Fri January 22 2010, Ben Coleman wrote:
>> This is why I use ZoneEdit.com for secondary/slave DNS - if the
>> registrar's nameservers go down for a few hours my domain isn't
>> unreachable.  And if you've got 5 or less domains, it's free.
> 
> I have an account on zoneEdit, but I'm not quite sure how it works..
> I have my own domain, pcartwright.com, and it is hosted by justhost.com with 
> THREE DNS servers..
> 
> pcartwright.com. 86400 IN NS ns2.pipedns.com.
> pcartwright.com. 86400 IN NS ns1.pipedns.com.
> pcartwright.com. 86400 IN NS ns3.pipedns.com.
> 
> how would zoneedit help?

You can set a zone (domain) up as a slave zone on ZoneEdit, and point it
to the ip address of the master nameserver (the nameserver that contains
the master list of your zone's entries).  Then the two nameservers that
ZoneEdit assigns to the zone will periodically (how often depends on
refresh and retry settings in your SOA record) poll the master
nameserver to see if there are any changes, and pull them down if there
are any.  You should add those two nameservers to the one's registered
for the domain with your registrar.  If your primary nameserver
provider's nameservers go offline for awhile, the slave servers at
ZoneEdit will still be around and will resolve your zone's entries for
at least as long as the expiry setting specified in your SOA record
(typical settings are a week or two).

Not the the above mechanism is typically how your primary nameserver
provider handles the multiple servers they provide.  One of them is the
master, and contains the master copy of your zone's entries.  The others
are set up as slaves, and periodically poll the master to check for changes.

Note that using ZoneEdit for this depends somewhat on how tightly your
primary nameserver provider configures their nameservers.  It is
possible to configure the nameserver so that only specified servers are
allowed to poll the master nameserver.  If this is the case, you likely
can't use ZoneEdit in this manner (unless your primary gives you some
way of configuring additional slaves that are allow to do the poll).
Quite often, though, nameservers are configured to allow anyone to poll
and transfer the zone, and using ZoneEdit is possible.  In that case,
though, it's also possible for anyone with dig or nslookup to pull a
complete copy of your zone entries.

In my case, I run my own master nameservers, use ZoneEdit for additional
slaves, and configure my masters so that only the known slaves can poll
and transfer my zones.

Ben
- -- 
Ben Coleman oloryn at benshome.net | For the wise man, doing right trumps
http://oloryn.benshome.net/     | looking right.  For the fool, looking
Amateur Radio NJ8J              | right trumps doing right.
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