If my host is dead, what's best for my DNS to return? [REPOST]

[Kevin Darcy]

In the absence of 24/7/365 website availability, I suppose the best thing
would be to put up a static "site temporarily down" web page on some
vserver somewhere. When your main web site is down, just point the address
at that vserver. I would think you could find a web hosting company that
would be willing to put up such a page for a nominal fee. Or, even use some
free web hosting service like Geocities or whatever, if they support
vservers (or get a web hosting company to just redirect to a static page on
a free web service, which might be even cheaper than getting them to host
the static page themselves)...


- Kevin

Lord Apollyon wrote:

> I'm in a situation where choosing a dynip bandwidth solution is an
> emormously cheaper solution than a static ip# one.  (This is in
> Australia, where *cough* there is really only one provider - and they
> charge per MB on the "business" connection options.)
>
> Anyhow, before I let go of our static ip# block [ISDN 1B - $300/mon +
> bandwidth charges] and switch over to the ADSL [$80/mon for 512/128k +
> no bandwidth charges] - I am prepare a customised dynamic DNS updating
> scheme which uses cryptographic notification protocols, etc.
>
> Anyway, I will also be doing some rudimentary line monitoring (by the
> DNS servers) to check on the server on the dynip not only being alive,
> but also OUR server - so it's not just a ping or UDP/TCP equivalent.  It
> will also be a cryptographic challenge-response. [1]
>
> Sooooooo, in the event the host is deemed to be dead by the DNS servers,
> I would like to have the DNS servers stop handing out the stale ip#.
> (After all, someone else could be running a mail/web/ftp server on that
> same ip#)
>
> Question is: should I set it to some junky address (say, a 10.a.b.c, or
> some unassigned network ip#), or should I just remove the zone
> temporarily and pretend the domain doesn't exist?  Or a variation on
> that, remove all of the IN A records but leave the SOA and maybe a
> trusted secondary MX backup)?
>
> Please don't flame me for my decision - we're a cash-strapped startup,
> and the Telstra Tax is a significant cost to us.  I have root privs on
> my primary domain's servers [located States-side on static ip#s], but I
> do make use of some secondaries where I do not have root.
>
> And no, I don't like the existing dyndns.org/et al solutions... I want
> some semblence of security, and am prepared to write some customised
> comms software around O-SSL if need be to implement the
> challege/response protocols.
>
> =Rob=
>
> PS: Apologies if this appears twice, my original post this afternoon
> didn't show up on the local news-spool.
>
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