On Sat, 3 Aug 2002, Chris Wedgwood wrote:
For larger companies with various automated systems this can be a pain and also a source of anguish for a variety of reasons.
Agreed. But it is doable and you'd have to ask why these larger companies who probably have spent many thousands of dollars on routers overseas and circuits to connect them across the Pacific and the Tasman can't afford to spend the few thousand dollars need to run a remote secondary server. You could run this on a PC based server with a decent amount of memory and no spinning disk for a few thousand dollars.
Many people are also of the attitude that if one name-server let alone both are down for a given network, then 'who cares' as everything else important such as email and www is also busted. And for many people this is to a large extent true.
But if you've arranged to have your web server offsite or you're getting your mail delivered to one of the big ISPs mail server instead of exposing your own, you're toast. And I'd rather have someone resolve my domain name and find the network is down when they try to use the address rather then get no response from the DNS and think "looks like that domain name is bogus". And at least that way mail will get queued in the system for a while until you sort out the network problems. It's interesting to do a 'dig ns xxxx' for most of the large ISPs in NZ. Most have their name servers apparently on the same segment. Perhaps they all have multiple DNS servers located globally and are using ANYCAST to make this transparent to us all but somehow I doubt it. I'm happy to be shot down in flames on this one as long as whoever does it publishes all the details here so that others can learn. (:-) - To unsubscribe from nznog, send email to majordomo(a)list.waikato.ac.nz where the body of your message reads: unsubscribe nznog