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Comment by tom_fitzhenry | Hacker News Reader

To further improve reliability, consider using a secondary-as-a-service (as well as your self-hosted secondary name service). This will only work if tinydns supports zone transfers (AXFR/IXFR), which as far as I can tell, it doesn't.

I don't use a self-hosted secondary. I use a secondary-as-a-service as my secondary /and primary/, which has the advantage of my VPS going down (for less than 4 weeks) wouldn't impact my DNS's uptime.

I blogged about it this month: https://tom-fitzhenry.me.uk/blog/2012/12/host-your-own-dns-w...

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Before I picked up the Ramnode server I was using BuddyNS as my primary with the prgmr node as the stealth primary. It worked fine but it was less straightforward than I wanted.

I'm using prgmr and buddyns as secondaries to my djbdns primary. axfrdns (part of the djbdns package) handles the zone transfer requests, and I can force a transfer with a really simple perl script.

Though the stealth primary solution involves more moving pieces, and introduces zone transfers, which are more complex than provisioning via puppet, I've had no noticeable issues.

I say "noticeable issues", because although my DNS is monitored, the monitoring isn't granular enough to detect sub-minute outages, for example.

Did you have any issues in particular with the stealth primary solution?

Not any technical issues, it was just more moving pieces than I want. BuddyNS is a fine service but having to force an update with an email seemed pretty hacky.

You can use DNS NOTIFY rather than sending an email. When the primary is updated, DNS NOTIFY will tell each secondary about the change.

DNS NOTIFY is standardised in: https://tools.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1996.txt

BIND 8+ supports it by default, according to http://docstore.mik.ua/orelly/networking_2ndEd/dns/ch10_03.h...

There is a perl script to achieve the same thing in djbdns, according to http://www.fefe.de/djbdns/#notify (which joe_bleau alluded to).

Any idea where ramnodes datacenter is? And perhaps an ip address to try some traceroutes there?

> This will only work if tinydns supports zone transfers (AXFR/IXFR), which as far as I can tell, it doesn't.

http://cr.yp.to/djbdns/axfrdns.html

It does. I'm doing this currently, I host primary DNS myself with tinydns, and the makefile sends a notify to the registrar-hosted slave DNS, which gets data via this daemon (with tcp server configured to only allow that IP).

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