Everything resolved to a single IP address

Jim Reid jim at rfc1035.com
Wed Apr 5 19:00:21 UTC 2000


>>>>> "Barry" == Barry Margolin <barmar at bbnplanet.com> writes:

    >> In article <38EB252C.D925DD20 at intnet.mu>, John <costume at intnet.mu> wrote:
    >> If our company's link to the internet is down I would like all
    >> my users to go to a particular web page (which would explain
    >> about the outage) whenever someone tries to surf.  Is it
    >> possible to configure BIND so that requests for all names are
    >> resolved to a single IP address?

    Barry> Make your server a master server for the root domain, and
    Barry> in the root.db file put:

    Barry> * IN A <web server address>

    Barry> I don't know any way to make this take effect automatically
    Barry> only when the Internet link is down.  What I believe you'll
    Barry> have to do is manually reconfigure your nameserver when
    Barry> that happens, and then put it back to normal (with a root
    Barry> hints file instead of a master zone file) when the link
    Barry> comes back.

Why not "solve" this problem by using a proxy web server that flashes
up a "the internet link is dead" page when the line breaks instead of
doing something as ugly as kludging wildcard A records into a name
server on the fly? Provided everyone uses the web proxy, it should
just work. If a wilcard A record like this is deployed, things might
go horribly wrong for email. All off-site mail will probably end up
getting sent to this web server which will bounce it if it has a mail
listener. Similar results are likely for other network services.




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