Any DNS guru's out there?

[Vyper28]

I'm trying to set up an offsite DNS backup for our server.

Currently we have ourdomain.com registers and pointing to ns1.ourdomain.com and ns2.ourdomain.com. Both of these ns1 and ns2 are the same server. Our DNS server hosts 25-30 clients DNS.

As we learned recently, if our DNS dies.. or our sonicwall gets moody. All our clients DNS goes down.

I have a rackspace account, that comes with DNS hosting. I'm trying to wrap my head around how I can re-point NS2.ourdomain.com to rackspace and duplicated all my DNS server entries on their DNS management utility.

The parts I'm getting stuck at: If I update ns1.ourdomain.com to point to rackspace.. I would be doing this on my own server. If my logic is correct, that wont help because if my server goes down, it will never point people to rackspace. I thought I could set it at registrar level, but none of the subdomains are managed through them, we only used them to register the domain name. As far as I can tell, there is no DNS pointing going on on their end, all they have is ourdomain.com pointing to ns1/ns2.

I'm new to DNS, so this is all a bit confusing. I thought I understood how it worked but I'm failing to grasp what is actually needed to have all of our clients hosted on our dns, and also on rackspace in case our machine goes down.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

At registrar (like GoDaddy)...wherever you registered "clientsdomain.com"...point the DNS servers to dns1.stabletransit.com and dns2.stabletransit.com

Now log into your RackSpace dashboard, Hosting, Cloud Sites, "Add a Site"...follow the wizard.
Practice this with a scratch domain first...not an important production one.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

Any custom DNS entries you made in your local servers....dump 'em. Same if you made custom entries in your clients servers...as far as for the public side. This will now follow the standards of public DNS...done up in data centers.

 

[Vyper28]

So if I understand.. This would be moving everything to rackspace and we would have no need for our DNS server anymore?

Is this common practice? What happens if rackspace's DNS goes down?

 

[TAPtech]

When rackspace's DNS goes down, yours has already been down 5 times!

 

[EvolutionElectronics]

it doesn't go down, if it does the internet is broken lol

 

[Vyper28]

Thanks for all the help,

I'm playing with a second work website domain first to get used to it. Our server has so many entries for each domain...

www, ftp, mail
some have smtp, pop.

I played a bit and when I moved my www A record and my MX record, I did not get email. I assume this is because I need the mail.mydomain.com A record as well or the sender server doesn't understand my MX record that points to mail.mydomain.com?

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

So if I understand.. This would be moving everything to rackspace and we would have no need for our DNS server anymore?

Is this common practice? What happens if rackspace's DNS goes down?

You'll need a DNS server for your active directory....if you run a domain controller. But you won't need to use that local DNS server for public DNS, you don't need port 53 open/exposed. Traffic making requests to *.clientsdomain.com will get directed to Rackspaces DNS servers (since you pointed the DNS for those domains to those servers at GoDaddy)

Rackspace has higher uptime than Amazon.....they're incredibly reliable. If Rackspace's servers are down (and they are global)....we have something much more catastrophic to worry about, like some huge meteor crashed into the earth, or North Korea starting nuking the rest of the world.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

Thanks for all the help,

I'm playing with a second work website domain first to get used to it. Our server has so many entries for each domain...

www, ftp, mail
some have smtp, pop.

I played a bit and when I moved my www A record and my MX record, I did not get email. I assume this is because I need the mail.mydomain.com A record as well or the sender server doesn't understand my MX record that points to mail.mydomain.com?

Lemme know if you want more help there...I sent you a screenshot of the DNS on my wifes work domain. The a-records, cnames, mx...if you've set them up on your own local DNS server...you should be comfortable with them on this one....just follow the same practices. With each "site" that you add...you'll have WWW and POP mailboxes added. Don't have to use those like if you're client has a local Exchange server...mail follows there the MX record points.

 

[SoloCon]

If the Domain name is with Godaddy, they also offer DNS services on all domains. Unless you plan on hosting with Rackspace, Keep the domain name pointing to GD and use their interface. This will give 1 less network to worry about about (as stated, RackSpace I don't think has ever gone down that I know of) when/if something does happen.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

I prefer to split it...registration and DNS. GoDaddys DNS panel is clunky, and they've had reliability issues, painful support. RackSpace is far superior for hosting and their control panel is excellent, plus great support.

 

[Vyper28]

For now they gave me free DNS with a cloud storage account for like... $2/mo so Rackspace is a great option for us. We will look at using them for hosting as well in the future, but at least this is low cap investment for reliable offsite DNS.