DNS Rebuild

Yash

Bass
Dated: January 1, 2004

Several hours ago, we started a transparent DNS system rebuild that is transparently recreating your DNS records. The reason for the rebuild is a proactive measure after we discovered that a mail server issue 2 weeks ago that affected qmail also affected the domain system. We initiated the recreate as the domain system seems to be damaged and not repairing it can lead to serious issues in the following months.

At most, customers will experience about 60 seconds of outage. If you experience anything beyond that or your domain/subdomain does not resolve, that is due to the fact that your ISP has picked up our slave DNS server instead of the master DNS server (this happens in only 1% of the cases, very rare and mainly happens if you configured ns2 instead of ns1 by mistake as your primary server).

The reason slave is affected is that the master DNS server is being rebuilt and then the changes are propogated to the slave server. But this takes time. We are doing proactive Slave DNS reloads every 30 to 60 minutes to ensure that if any of your visitors are picking up the slave DNS server, they aren't affected for more than 30 minutes

Also, if your ISP picks up the Slave DNS (which is rare as already said), and then caches the Slave DNS, you'd end up with ISP caching preventing you from viewing your site till they refresh their records. NO CUSTOMER has reported this to us, and if it does happen, you'd have to use a different ISP while it refreshes (maximum time for a refresh is normally 24 hours).

Also, if your ISP picks up the Slave DNS, and you visit the site during that 30minute period, your local computer may cache the slave DNS record and your site may appear down when it is actually not. To correct that, simply run dns /flush from Start > Run

All in all, the DNS rebuild is a proactive measure and WILL and WOULD NOT cause downtime unless under the rare circumstances (which can happen on any DNS system) that are outlined above occur.
 
Back
Top