DNS setup
From Blitzed
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[edit] The registrar
blitzed.org the domain is registered through sackheads as an OpenSRS reseller and needs to be renewed at a cost of about $10/year.
Details about this domain name registration -- including what the authoritative servers are -- can be set from http://sackheads.org/dns/ but this will require the domain management password which only EB members have.
[edit] Authoritative DNS
Our public-facing authoritative DNS servers for the blitzed.org zone are provided by nameserver.net, notably jpayne. In event of an emergency you probably won't be able to find jpayne on Blitzed though; ask grifferz or mail jpayne AT sackheads.org.
We do not have any access to the nameserver.net machines, instead they build their configurations from a config file which we host at http://lamancha.blitzed.org/sackfigurator.conf.
The relevant part of this file will look something like this:
dns blitzed.org {
master lamancha.blitzed.org
slave sjc.nameserver.net
slave sou.nameserver.net
slave phl.nameserver.net
slave bos.nameserver.net
slave iad.nameserver.net
}
This tells the nameserver.net setup that they should be trying to AXFR blitzed.org from lamancha.blitzed.org and then goes on to give a list of nameserver.net boxes that are also authoritative.
If for some reason we need to make another DNS server be our hidden master then firstly we would need to set that up and then alter sackfigurator.conf to have that machine as the new master. Otherwise nameserver.netwill continue to try to AXFR from lamancha.
If we needed to move sackfigurator.conf then we would need to tell jpayne where it has been moved to before this would be picked up.
The blitzed.org zone data is kept in CVS in the blitzed-dns module. To edit the zone under normal circumstances you need to get a CVS checkout of this module on nubian.
What you do next depends on what sort of change you are trying to make:
[edit] Depooling/repooling a server
Depooling and repooling servers now has its own page.
[edit] Other zone modifications
Simply edit the zone with your favourite editor.
After any of the above you need to update the zone. To do this we use the update.pl script. It will ask you a bunch of questions which you can generally say yes to (just press return) and finally dump you into the normal CVS commit log message part. Write a concise explanation of what you did and why, save and quit.
A CVS commit will now happen followed by a reload of named. You should be able to watch in #sys to see the XFRs taking place.
[edit] Statistics
Judging from the statistics done by tilia.nedworks.org, being one out of five authoritative servers for blitzed.org, the following extrapolated statistics for this zone seem about accurate:
- About 1750 queries/min, 3000 max
- Roughly 1250 MB each day
This is just for the top zone blitzed.org, excluding (but serving referrals to) opm.blitzed.org.
[edit] About irc.blitzed.org
irc.blitzed.org is handled separately from the rest of the blitzed.org zone - it's actually a CNAME into the geo.blitzed.org subdomain.
geo.blitzed.org is hosted off PowerDNS servers on nubian, tilia.nedworks.org and omni.altweb.net (or ns{0,1,2}.blitzed.org) using our GeoBackend for poor man's geographic load balancing. As long as PowerDNS is running on each server, there should be no problem here.