[Gllug] VPS, MX records and Virtualmin

[Neil Macvicar]

On the issue of fault tolerance, here is where i envisage a commercial provider to have an advantage :- 

1. equipment failure - many registrars also provide hosting etc., they have good redundant systems in place to mitigate this risk. 
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. 
3. bandwidth - they will likely have superior bandwidth available compared to a self hosted system, better able to survive DoS. 
4. SLA - If you pay a bit extra and go with a good registrar, you can get SLA's from them. 
5. security - they employ security professionals. 

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. 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. 

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). 


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. 

All in all though, good points to provoke thought when planning what to do ! 

Cheers, 
--Neil. 

----- Original Message -----

From: "Nix" <nix at esperi.org.uk> 
To: "Greater London Linux User Group" <gllug at gllug.org.uk> 
Sent: Friday, 18 March, 2011 12:15:53 AM 
Subject: Re: [Gllug] VPS, MX records and Virtualmin 

On 17 Mar 2011, Neil Macvicar outgrape: 

> You'd be better off using a registrars DNS system - more fault tolerant. 

Really? As long as you have a couple of secondaries, I don't see how 
they would be more fault tolerant than you are. DNS really is good at 
this: I had a pair of interlocoking bugs (one in bind's build system, 
one in my monitoring code) take my authoritative named down for a 
*month*. I noticed only when I updated a zonefile and it didn't take. 
The secondaries had taken up the load so flawlessly that neither I nor 
anyone looking up names really noticed. 

The big downside with having someone else run your authoritative 
nameserver is that if they go bust or something you are screwed for a 
long time. I lost a month's email once because my ISP was taken over by 
another one that decided to change everyone's static IP addresses, 
forget to fix their mailservers to allow incoming mail from the new 
addresses, and break their hosting console (such as it was) such that 
you couldn't change your MX records either -- and of course you couldn't 
email them, even via telnet to port 25, because their mailserver refused 
connections from people on your new IP. 

Getting out of *that*, well, getting a MAC seemed fastest, only they 
dragged their feet there, too. If I'd had control over my own DNS at 
least I could have fixed my MX up and kept on receiving my own email 
while I switched ISP, even if I still couldn't have sent my ISP email. 

So now I run my own DNS. 

-- 
NULL && (void) 
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