<html><head><style type='text/css'>p { margin: 0; }</style></head><body><div style='font-family: Verdana; font-size: 10pt; color: #000000'><span>On the issue of fault tolerance, here is where i envisage a commercial provider to have an advantage :-<br><br>1. equipment failure - many registrars also provide hosting etc., they have good redundant systems in place to mitigate this risk.<br>2. backup/restore - it's a core part of their business to have this kind of plan in place. If they lose even a small amount of data, their credibility is ruined.<br>3. bandwidth - they will likely have superior bandwidth available compared to a self hosted system, better able to survive DoS.<br>4. SLA - If you pay a bit extra and go with a good registrar, you can get SLA's from them.<br>5. security - they employ security professionals.<br><br>You raise some valid points below about the dangers of trusting a company with your domains, which is the underlying issue. I think that one or more of the points going wrong on a home run system are more likely than a good registrar going bust. </span><span>Whilst it is unlikely that a well-picked registrar will go bust,
it does occasionally happen. Some good registrars have a business
continuity plan in this event. If you are concerned that this is an
issue, look for companies that provide this level of forward planning.<br><br></span><span>As long as you can update your resolver records, you have no big problem. Nominet allow you to do this for .co.uk domains directly for a fee. If your provider goes bust, log in and change the IPS tags. I'm not sure if other TLD registries have the same service or not (I would hope that they have).<br><br><br>On your point of problematic MX records, if you were serious about having deliverability, you would have had at least two MX records, each record resolving to a machine distinctly separate network wise and company wise. This would have mitigated the problem you outlined.<br><br>All in all though, good points to provoke thought when planning what to do !<br><br>Cheers,<br>--Neil.<br></span><br><hr id="zwchr"><div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; font-family: Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"><b>From: </b>"Nix" <nix@esperi.org.uk><br><b>To: </b>"Greater London Linux User Group" <gllug@gllug.org.uk><br><b>Sent: </b>Friday, 18 March, 2011 12:15:53 AM<br><b>Subject: </b>Re: [Gllug] VPS, MX records and Virtualmin<br><br>On 17 Mar 2011, Neil Macvicar outgrape:<br><br>> You'd be better off using a registrars DNS system - more fault tolerant. <br><br>Really? As long as you have a couple of secondaries, I don't see how<br>they would be more fault tolerant than you are. DNS really is good at<br>this: I had a pair of interlocoking bugs (one in bind's build system,<br>one in my monitoring code) take my authoritative named down for a<br>*month*. I noticed only when I updated a zonefile and it didn't take.<br>The secondaries had taken up the load so flawlessly that neither I nor<br>anyone looking up names really noticed.<br><br>The big downside with having someone else run your authoritative<br>nameserver is that if they go bust or something you are screwed for a<br>long time. I lost a month's email once because my ISP was taken over by<br>another one that decided to change everyone's static IP addresses,<br>forget to fix their mailservers to allow incoming mail from the new<br>addresses, and break their hosting console (such as it was) such that<br>you couldn't change your MX records either -- and of course you couldn't<br>email them, even via telnet to port 25, because their mailserver refused<br>connections from people on your new IP.<br><br>Getting out of *that*, well, getting a MAC seemed fastest, only they<br>dragged their feet there, too. If I'd had control over my own DNS at<br>least I could have fixed my MX up and kept on receiving my own email<br>while I switched ISP, even if I still couldn't have sent my ISP email.<br><br>So now I run my own DNS.<br><br>-- <br>NULL && (void)<br>--<br>Gllug mailing list - Gllug@gllug.org.uk<br>http://lists.gllug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/gllug<br></div><br></div></body></html>