[150549] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Reliable Cloud host ?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Randy Carpenter)
Mon Feb 27 12:36:58 2012
Date: Mon, 27 Feb 2012 12:36:00 -0500 (EST)
From: Randy Carpenter <rcarpen@network1.net>
To: Jared Mauch <jared@puck.nether.net>
In-Reply-To: <D7DF15F1-8609-4650-A3B0-0472AF02158D@puck.nether.net>
Cc: Nanog <nanog@nanog.org>
Errors-To: nanog-bounces+nanog.discuss=bloom-picayune.mit.edu@nanog.org
> Pardon the weird question:
>
> Is the DNS service authoritative or recursive? If auth, you can
> solve this a few ways, either by giving the DNS name people point to
> multiple AAAA (and A) records pointing at a diverse set of
> instances.
Authoritative. But, also not the only thing that we are running that needs some geographic and route diversity.
> DNS is designed to work around a host being down. Same
> goes for MX and several other services. While it may make the
> service slightly slower, it's certainly not the end of the world.
Oh, how I wish this were true in practice. If I had a dollar for every time we had serious issues because one of a few authoritative DNS servers was not responding... OK, I wouldn't be rich, but this happens all the time. Caching servers out on the net get a "non-answer" because the server they chose to ask was down, and it caches that. They shouldn't do that, but they do, and there's nothing that can be done about it.
-Randy
