Re: Thoughts on a large-scale DNS server...

From: John Von Essen (john_at_essenz.com)
Date: 06/28/05

  • Next message: Dan Ross: "Re: option 82 on isc dhcp"
    Date: Tue, 28 Jun 2005 11:23:14 -0400 (EDT)
    To: Adam Jacob Muller <adam@oxeo.com>
    
    

    Adam,

    Thanks for the info. The two servers will be in two geographically
    separated datacenters. I am unfamiliar with djbdns. The first question I
    have is, are zone file configurations the same. We currently have all
    11,000 zone files ready to go within a BIND environment, and we really
    dont want to have to change the core config style of all those domains.

    As for TTL, we currently use a 24 hour TTL, for zone file itself we then
    do something like:

    $TTL 86400
    @ IN SAO ...
                   2004100500 ; Serial
                   10800 ; Refresh after 3 hour
                   3600 ; Retry after 1 hour
                   604800 ; Expire after 1 week
                   86400 ) ; Minimum TTL of 1 day

    The majority of our dns will rarely if "ever" change. I would only use
    Linux if I was really convinced that BIND (or djbdns) for some reason or
    another ran better (better pthread support, etc.,.) on it. But then again
    I'm partial to FreeBSD.

    -John

    On Tue, 28 Jun 2005, Adam Jacob Muller wrote:

    > I annotated your message below, basically explaining our similar setup.
    >
    > On Jun 28, 2005, at 10:42 AM, John Von Essen wrote:
    >
    > > I have been tasked with setting up a large-scale dns server
    > > environment
    > > (One ISP is taking over another ISP) and would greatly appreciate any
    > > thouhts or experiences that could help me out.
    > >
    > > In the end we will probably be doing authoritative DNS for 11,000
    > > domains,
    > > and another 200 or so in-arpa address ranges for reverse resolution.
    >
    > we have ~ 10k domains right now, and much less than 200 ptr's
    >
    > >
    > > The plan is to have 3 core machines. One is the master, and gets
    > > its zone
    > > files created from local cvs exports. The other two are slaves, and do
    > > zone transfers from the master. The Public will actually only talk to
    > > these two slave DNS servers (NS1 and NS2). The machines themselves
    > > will be
    > > Single 3Ghz Xeon, 1Gb Memory, and 70Gb RAID 1 U320 SCSI. For every
    > > machine, we will have a standby machine waiting and ready.
    >
    > sounds like a very conservative setup, and for DNS that's good. if at
    > all possible I
    > would suggest that you move at least one of those servers to a
    > totally seperate network.
    > This is important, if your network is unreachable for say, 20 minutes
    > for any reason, anyone who queries
    > your dns in that time and caches the result will be unable to connect
    > until that invalid entry clears from their cache.
    >
    > As slashdot tells us, some providers ignore your set records,
    > http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?
    > sid=05/04/18/198259&tid=95&tid=128&tid=4
    > so this is a very prudent step as i'm sure providers also tweak the
    > retry times since a failed lookups are
    > more likely to be repeated and consume more resources than successful
    > ones.
    >
    >
    > >
    > > The first question is, do I have enough CPU/Memory. Keep in mind these
    > > machines will nothing but DNS.
    >
    > Yes
    >
    > >
    > > Are there any performace issues with using regular filesystem
    > > directory
    > > zone file storage. For example, we will have a very large
    > > named.conf file
    > > with some 11,000 zone entries (I have never worked with a named.conf
    > > file that big before). Those entries will just reference the local
    > > filesystem, file "s/a/adam.com"; and so on.
    > >
    > > The next big question is BIND8 or BIND9. I would like to take
    > > advantage of
    > > threading in BIND9, but saw a previous post that BIND9 can have
    > > difficulty
    > > working with BIND8 servers which were incorrectly setup, whereas
    > > BIND8 can
    > > allow for a certain level of "external" incompetence.
    >
    > the real question is, do you want to use bind at all?
    > We currently use djbdns to manage everything, i personally find it to
    > be much more tolerant of errors than any version of bind.
    > http://cr.yp.to/djbdns.html
    >
    >
    > >
    > > And finally, Linux or FreeBSD, and if FreeBSD, 4 or 5.
    >
    > FreeBSD
    >
    > >
    > > Current staff (besides me) whats to run Debian Linux, but BIND9
    > > pthreads
    > > dont work in Linux, do they work in FreeBSD? I want to use FreeBSD
    > > just
    > > because it better overall with regards to TCP/IP.
    >
    > Debian is a good, stable linux distro, my personal favorite in fact.
    > (though gentoo is also nice).
    > Linux is more reliable out of the box, FreeBSD can and is more
    > reliable if you know how to work it.
    >
    > >
    > > The only performance numbers we got from the other ISP, is that
    > > existing
    > > dns servers use about a constanst 400 kbps (bits) of bandwidth.
    >
    > The bandwidth, the needed server specs are a combination of two
    > things. First, the number of domains you have and 2nd the TTL on
    > those domains.
    > We currently use a TTL of 12 hours. This serves us well. If you halve
    > the TTL to say, 6 hours, expect to double the number of DNS queries.
    > If you double the TTL to 24 hours, expect to halve the number of DNS
    > queries.
    >
    > >
    > > Thanks in advance
    > > John
    > > _______________________________________________
    > > freebsd-isp@freebsd.org mailing list
    > > http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-isp
    > > To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-isp-unsubscribe@freebsd.org"
    > >
    >
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  • Next message: Dan Ross: "Re: option 82 on isc dhcp"

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