Atha,
Let me share with you what we did at the company I used to work for (and this is an
identical configuration to what I have setup for myself). We don't have master and slave
PDNS servers. We have "workers" of sorts. Our master and slaves are the MySQL
backends.
We have a master MySQL server which is the server that we perform all writes
against. It serves as the master backend, and no PDNS installations connect to
it directly. In fact, PDNS isn't even installed on the server that hosts the
master backend. Then, on each physical (or virtual) DNS server, we have MySQL
server and PDNS installed. The MySQL server, which is a slave backend,
replicates off of the master backend. Then, PDNS connects to the local MySQL
server for its backend.
There are many advantages to setting it up this way:
- Performance: Our PDNS servers are able to more quickly serve out answers to
questions since they are connecting to a local MySQL instance instead of a
remote MySQL instance, and we don't have multiple PDNS servers querying the
same MySQL database, which also decreases response time.
- Robustness: If our master backend goes down, all PDNS servers can continue to answer
questions because they are oblivious to this downtime. This is very convenient for
maintenance periods, also. If one of the "worker" servers goes down, again,
this is transparent to the master backend and to the other workers, which continue to
operate as if nothing had happened. We don't use master-master replication and, in fact,
this increases redundancy, it doesn't decrease it.
This is a pretty standard way of configuring PowerDNS, and it has worked very
well for us. We have had 0% DNS-answer downtime in the last three years, even
when our master backend crashed due to a hardware failure six months ago. It's
hard to find any problems with that kind of result.
This is likely a good fit with your organization's needs, as well. I encourage
you to look into it. As always, when using MySQL replication, make sure you
have a DBA who understands (or at least is willing to devote serious time to
understanding beforehand) MySQL replication before implementing this system.
MySQL replication is very powerful, but it is also a challenging system to set
up. If you do it right, it will work great for you. If you tune something
wrong, you could experience some hard-to-diagnose replication issues (which,
fortunately, will not affect the uptime of your PowerDNS services).
One more thing, which I believe you will find very helpful. The nature of MySQL replication is that it can go down
temporarily to account for minor network fluctuations and recover gracefully. However, problems can arise if it's down
for long periods of time; say, over 48 hours. What we did is set up a very small, PHP-based Cron job that runs on every
worker server every ten minutes, connects to the local MySQL slave backend, and executes the query "SHOW SLAVE
STATUS;". It then looks at the columns "Slave_IO_Running" and "Slave_SQL_Running" in the
result set. If they aren't BOTH "Yes", it sends us an alert email, and we know there's an issue that needs to
be addressed. I highly recommend you do something similar.
Feel free to ask me any questions you may have.
Nick
On Nov 10, 2010, at 8:29 AM, Atha Kouroussis wrote:
Hi all,
we are looking to migrate from bind to PowerDNS with MySQL backend. Our initial
tests have gone really well and we are now looking into finalizing the
architecture for the final deployment and migration. In that respect we have a
couple of doubts.
Since we are going to be using the MySQL backend, and we are going to have
multiple PowerDNS servers deployed, is it possible to have several instances of
pdns share the same backend? How does that affect slave updates in case a
master has more than one slave configured and both slaves use the same backend?
If its not possible to use the same backend, we are thinking of using MySQL
replication, master-slave, and have only one pdns instance listed as slave.
What we don't like about this setup is the lack of redundancy since in order to
have more than one slave listed we would have to use master-master replication,
which we are trying to avoid.
What are your thoughts on this? Are there any best practices/recommendations
for large deployments? Thanks in advance for all your help.
Cheers,
Atha
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