The IP address of my nameserver belongs to the ISP that is now providing my internet connection. If my ISP goes out of business (again), the IP address of my nameserver WILL change. If the root servers are still giving out the old IP address when doing a lookup...That's because NetSol isn't letting you easily make the change you need to make.
, even if my nameserver is authoritative, which it is, no one will no how to find me until I get that information changed with NetSol.
Correct.
This is why I was hoping I could have a "standby" nameserver with an IP address of my "backup" ISP. Or am I having a basic brainfart which is certainly possible due to the amt of hours I've been putting in to get things "fixed"
This is the time to do the following:
I *despise* dealing with Netsol but this decision is not mine. I have suggested several times to find a new registrar and have been shot down in flames.Go back to the person/people you suggested it to, and say "I know I've suggested this before, but if we switch to another registrar, we can take care of this problem very easily." :)
It sounds like the source of the entire problem was that your primary DNS server had an IP that disappeared, and you couldn't make the change at NetSol. That's a very good reason (in my opinion) to dump NetSol. That's better than trying to find out if they have some other way (for an extra fee, most likely) to deal with the problem.
>(perhaps temporarily hard-coding the new IP with the HOSTS file).Unfortunately, that won't work. It's the secondary nameserver that you could hard-code the new IP in, so that it would find the primary even though it had switched IPs. That way, the secondary (which is reachable) would be able to respond to DNS queries with the new IPs, until the parent (root) servers had the new IP for your primary.
Hard coding the new IP address in the hosts file of my primary nameserver? Will that work until I can get it changed with my registar? That's an excellent idea if that will work!
>>short TTL's are the key to defeating the effect of caching of records make
>>stale by changes.
> I would say that's a good practice when you know in advance a change is coming. We had NO notice
The key here is to have short enough TTLs that you can deal with a problem like this in a reasonable amount of time. If you had a TTL of a week, that would have been a problem. A TTL of a day would have given you an average of about 1/2 day of downtime -- a good compromise between a high enough TTL to keep performance high, and low enough to deal with the rare serious problem.
> I'm trying to take as many practical steps NOW, to prevent the impact this had, just in case it ever does happen again.
My recommendation in this case would be to outsource the DNS. You still have full control over the DNS, but have another company responsible for making sure that "it just works." There are quite a few to choose from, but if you want a place to start, from experience I can recommend UltraDNS and EasyDNS. UltraDNS is ultra reliable (used by some ccTLDs, for example) at a price, EasyDNS is dirt cheap and has 4 nameservers you can use if you like (rather than the 2 that most people use).
-Scott
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