who hosts my domain name - my own nameserver? mini-isp...

[Kevin Darcy]

Tim Gardner wrote:

> >You may not value redundancy very much; after all, why should you
> >care if your mail is
> >a little late arriving, right? But think about all of the various
> >sites that may be
> >trying to *send* that mail. Some of them process hundreds of
> >thousands, if not millions
> >or tens of millions of messages a day, and I can speak from
> >experience that one of the
> >biggest headaches in managing a large mail site is all of the mail
> >which gets stuck in
> >the queue because it cannot be delivered in a timely fashion. And in
> >a large percentage
> >of cases, this is because the DNS lookups are failing. So please be
> >a good net.citizen
> >and run a reliable DNS, if at all.
>
> This makes great sense, but as a newbie to DNS, I don't understand
> one issue with this.  Suppose I have a mail server and a primary DNS
> on the same machine which goes down.  If the secondary DNS is up,
> doesn't this still mean that the messages get stuck in the queue?
> How is this better than if there was no secondary DNS up?  (I'm just
> trying to separate the issues and understand the basics.)

Yeah, I guess a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. It's best
if you have a redundant DNS *and* a fallback MX. At least then only one
machine gets its queue clogged when your box is down.


- Kevin