Downtime & DNS

[ambo]

I was trying to get on the net through my GPRS modem this afternoon and despite connecting successfully - i could not get through to any sites i wanted to.

I did a little digging and discovered that the DNS server i had been allocated to was not responding to pings.

I don't have accurate info on this but i'm sure that a considerable amount of downtime that us internet users experience is due to the DNS servers (address books for the internet) going offline.

Now i know this is a bit of a long shot - but why can't the ISP's publish a nice little list of all the available DNS servers so that we can change to another one when one goes offline???

 

[thisgeek]

Some of them do.
They should have primary & secondary, in some cases tertiary servers.
Each server should be on different networks according to the RFCs as I recall, purely for redundancy purposes.

 

[ambo]

Some of them do.
They should have primary & secondary, in some cases tertiary servers.
Each server should be on different networks according to the RFCs as I recall, purely for redundancy purposes.

I think the whole RFC requirement is more for the servers that hosts the domains - i'm specifically refering to the lookup/caching servers that the isp's offer for their dial-up/connection clients.
When i looked at the DNS server that had been allocated be the vodacom DHCP primary and secondary where the same IP
Where would we find lists of IP's for DNS lookup servers and are they "open" servers... cause as far as i know most are resricted to only serve specific groups of clients.

 

[thisgeek]

Doesn't matter. The RFC is for ALL DNS servers, not just for the root servers.

You might want to setup your own cacheing DNS service that queries the root domains instead of your uplinks.

If you want something that you can run locally on your windows box, I suggest taking a look at Tucows.

 

[ambo]

If you want something that you can run locally on your windows box, I suggest taking a look at Tucows.

I've actually tried that before - and i'm working on a new linux router box for the ADSL that will do that...
but for my - already memory starved - laptop it seems a little excessive and there SHOULD be a better solution