BIND Suitability For Providing Failover Web Server Management

Matt Brooke jumpingmattfish at gmail.com
Fri Feb 24 16:45:22 UTC 2006


I'm trying to find a low cost way of manging a situation which exists at the 
moment.

I host a website on a .uk.com domain through a UK registrar. All requests 
for this website come through their name servers and through our firewall to 
arrive at a single machine which then serves the web site.

However when the web site goes down we have no way of quickly changing to a 
back up server.

The thinking I had was to use an internal DNS server for managing all the 
external dns names and appropriate web sites which are hosted. If for 
example one of the web servers was to fail the internal DNS server could be 
instantly switched over to a failover machine.

Now the issue I have as to how this would be implemented if at all. Would 
the external DNS names need to have the nameservers changed to the new 
internal ones (red side accessible), adding the issue of a 6 hour update 
propogation or would i be able to route all traffic through the firewall to 
the dns server which would the route the traffic to the appropriate server 
which was up.

Many thanks for your assistance, and if more information is required please 
say so.

Matt Brooke 



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