[IMC-Tech] Re: [Imc] Insight Cable Installation this Wednesday AM...

[Zachary C. Miller]

Anytime after this weekend is good for me. Fridays are bad. 

It'd be great if someone could test the network connection's
stability. Set up some random machine on the cable modem and run a
ping every second to a few different known hosts and track packet loss
and downtime over a period of several days. Also run some bandwidth
tests for uplink and downlink to see what we're _really_ getting on a
sustained basis. Also, it'd be great if you could verify that it is
really the case that no ports are blocked.

It would also be great if someone could formulate a specific plan for
exactly how we should handle DNS stuff with the "sticky" IPs. Right
now OJC provides a DNS slave for us (ns2.chambana.net) and imsahp is
chambana.net's DNS master (ns.chambana.net). If imsahp is subject to
an occasional IP change, we don't want it to be the master and we
don't want it to be listed as any of the nameservers in the whois
records for all our domains. 

My thinking is that rather than using a master/slave set up we should
have 2 offsite (OJC and another one) DNS servers that are configured
as masters but that we PUSH (with SCP) DNS data to and HUP whenever we
change the central files on imsahp. So imsahp will be our central
master DNS server but only in the sense that that is where we edit the
data, the outside world will consider the 2 offsite servers to be the
canonical sources for chambana.net.

Does anyone have a proposal for where we might host the other DNS
server? Or does anyone have a proposal for how to dynamically update
our whois information while minimizing downtime when our IP changes?

My plan is: 

Set all our domains to have a 3 minute TTL on DNS queries so we
minimize downtime due to DNS caching.

Configure a machine to sit on the OLD IP address and answer DNS
queries until we figure out exactly how we'll handle DNS stuff. 

The T1 is paid until the end of the month then it will be retired. If
we haven't solved the DNS issues by then I'll move our primary DNS
server (the machine configured in the step above) to run on the McLeod
SDSL line that I still have (which will also be retired eventually). 

Once I retire the T1, I will be getting a network connection with a
static IP address up here in Chicago. I can host DNS for chambana.net
from there, that would solve our second-server issue. 

dan blah wrote:
> They will be running the cable line and activating the line this Wednesday
> in the AM.  This means we can plug a modem in and migrate the
> chambana.netserver over anytime after that.  What are good times for
> everyone?
> 
> --
> Daniel

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-- 
Zachary C. Miller - @= - http://zach.chambana.net/
IMSA 1995 - UIUC 2000 - Just Another Leftist Muppet - Ya Basta!
 Social Justice, Community, Nonviolence, Decentralization, Feminism,
 Sustainability, Responsibility, Diversity, Democracy, Ecology