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Possible Duplicate:
hosting your own DNS

Note: I realized belatedly that this is a duplicate of question 23744, which already has good answers. I couldn't close this post for lack of reputation, maybe someone else could step in.

I use hosted servers for my company and although I might opt for colocation of more customized machines in the future, on the whole I'm not too keen on diving too deep into "datacenter business". So generally, I would like to leave the handling of my infrastructure to dedicated pros as much as possible.

Recently, I've been starting to lust for some more flexibility regarding the DNS entries for my domain and have looked into running my own name server(s). It seems to me that running a professional, failsafe name server is a little more effort than I'm willing to commit to just now. Still, I like the idea of having a lot of control over it.

For a more experienced Sysadmin, what are indications to run own name servers? And when using name servers that are professionally maintained, what self-administration options are advisable to look out for?

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Hanno Fietz
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2 Answers2

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I think most people cross that line when they start saying things like, "Recently, I've been starting to lust for some more flexibility regarding the DNS entries for my domain". If all your needs are being met by a provider and you're happy, then you are good. If you start wanting to be able to do more, or use some form of automation / scripting it may be time.

I think most of the work with maintaining your DNS servers is up-front when you design them, and even then it's not too bad because there's a lot of excellent material out there to guide you. Unless you have a huge amount of change, keeping them running isn't much extra work at all.

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Running my own DNS servers would require:

1) Redundant highly available infrastructure

2) Multiple sites for disaster recovery

3) In-depth knowledge of DNS service configuration and protocol

I have the first two, but not the third, so I use EasyDNS

Edit

I should also note that this only refers to my external internet-facing DNS. My internal DNS is hosted on my Windows Domain Controllers.

Matt Simmons
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