On Fri, Jan 10, 2003 at 01:18:20AM -0800, James wrote: > Two questions.. > > I might be moving to Portland in a month or two, and I currently have a > web server with a number of web pages. What would be the best method of > keeping these pages online as I change address? I'm guessing it's going > to take Qwest two weeks to get me up and running again in Portland, but I > don't want my pages to be offline for two weeks. Obviously you need a place to continue to host it during the downtime. You can quite easily and seamlessly change the webserver IP out from underneath the domain names. See below.
> > Second question, I'm migrating to a new server (Mandrake 9), and I have my > old server on a dedicated ip.. whereas my new server also has its own > ip. I'm trying to figure out a way to make a smooth transfer to naming my > new server the same as my old server, and at the same time making > my old server a secondary. Right now I am just using the ip address > for the location of the new server. Can I just designate my new server as > the primary DNS, and my old one as a secondary DNS.. thus providing a > safety net if something on the new server is wrong? You say "server" and "naming server" (DNS). Are either of these related to the webserver? Are your domains being hosted by this DNS server (does a whois show this domain server)? > > Say, for example, I forget to create a virtual server on the new > server.. can the old one still serve the page that I forgot to add to the > new one? > > Man, that was pretty confusing. > > james Assuming you are hosting your own DNS servers if the dns is configured properly all you need to do is tell your domain registrar to use the new DNS server as a primary or secondary. In a day or two that information will propagate and no one will miss a beat. To keep your websites up, you need to have DNS for your domains and a place to host it. It doesn't have to be any where in particular, you could rent temporary space from a web host. Moving DNS servers as above is easy. Changing webserver IPs that domain names point to is a little trickier. If you don't care about up to 4 days of down time then you can just tell your dns server the new ip address. If you do care, you can reduce that to less than 5 minutes. Here's how: On your dns server (or call your dns host) specify the TTL (time to live) for your domains to 5 minutes. This means when someone looks up your domain name the dns server will tell that host to expire it in 5 minutes. So even if they just looked it up, 5 minutes later they will look it up again. First take note of what the TTL is. It is recorded in seconds. Say it is 3 days. Then after setting the TTL to 5 minutes, you need to wait 3 days for current caches to expire. Once this has passed all cached copies of your domain name will expire in 5 minutes. At any time (even during the middle of the day) you can change the IP addresses your domains point to. New lookups will go to the new IP. Cached lookups may look to the old IP, but this will only last for 5 minutes and less. If you are moving to a temporary IP before going to a permanent one, you might as well leave the TTL at 5 minutes. If you are moving directly to another, change the TTL back to 1-3 days at the same time you change the IP. Cory _______________________________________________ Eug-LUG mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mailman.efn.org/cgi-bin/listinfo/eug-lug
