DNS Servers

dominicl

Hi,

Just wondering...what set-up do people have for their DNS servers, and how much RAM does it have? Also, how many do you have?

How do you guys have yours set up?

Thanks

DanielM

My dns servers (Resolvers) are based on the following hardware

Intel Pentium 4 2GB RAM 80GB Hard Drive 1Gbps Connections

dominicl

@DanielM said: My dns servers (Resolvers) are based on the following hardware

Intel Pentium 4 2GB RAM 80GB Hard Drive 1Gbps Connections

Cheap, but effective I guess! :) I've seen some people using cheap VPS's (as this would only be for a personal website). How much RAM would you recommend?

Also, would the cPanel DNS only work OK?

dominicl

Looks like you need cPanel for DNSOnly. Is there any other way?

mistert

Just have a look on http://cr.yp.to/djbdns/tinydns.html

TinyDNS works "ok"....(just doing what a dns is supposed to do)...and already works on a VPS with 96MB RAM.

dominicl

Nice, thanks. I'll look into that. Any others?

mistert

Well...if you want to have it "low end"...you won´t have many other choices cos a normal bind9/named just needs a lot more resources for working.....

Asim

My DNS server cluster is based on 128MB VPSes

ns1=SecureDragon 128MB XEN-PV ns2=VooServers 128MB XEN-PV ns3=Hostigation 128MB KVM ns4=TheHostHouse 128MB XEN-HVM

I am using cPanel DNS-only to manage it (since its for cPanel)

Another cluster is an experiment that I am doing since a few months now, never got the time to finish it. Its a free DNS service

ns1 + ns2 using PowerDNS

Maounique

Or you can use free dns at some provider. I am with afraid.org since many-many years. Sure, if you have hundreds of domains and hosts, your own DNS will make sense. 128 MB should be enough even in that case, 20 GB a month bw will also suffice. M

vld

gdns uses 4 VPS containers, with 256-512MB of RAM. 2 at EDIS, 1 at Hostigation and 1 at OVH. Using gdnsd DNS daemon, RAM usage is below 50MB

dominicl

@Asim - Looked at PowerDNS.

Is this what you've done? http://www.howtoforge.com/installing-powerdns-with-mysql-backend-and-poweradmin-on-debian-etch

@vld - Thanks. Will look at that.

EDIT: PowerDNS looks like what I want, but I'm a bit confused about adding a 2nd server after the 1st one

NanoG6

@dominicl said: but I'm a bit confused about adding a 2nd server after the 1st one

it is using mysql replication. just replicate the two mysql database (NS1=master, NS2=slave).

dominicl

OK I think I get it :P Now to find 2 or 3 VPS's to use for it

gbshouse

24x 256MB/5GB Xen/KVM VMs with Ubuntu 12.04 LTS running custom build of PowerDNS with Percona Cluster

dominicl

24 :P Wow. lol

Kuro

Also have a look at NSD3, uses under 5MB of RAM in an OpenVZ container :)

NanoG6

I'm using prometeus 50MB VPS as master NS. PDNS + MySQL + NGINX + PHP-FPM (Sqlbuddy & Poweradmin)

dominicl

Wow that's nice. Thanks :) I'll do something like that.

MrDOS

I'll throw in another vote for NSD3. Been using it foe about a year on a 512MB all-in-one web hosting VPS with smashing success. Gonna try out the replication stuff one of these days.

William

All EDIS locations as well as my own and a VPS in Australia :)

Zen

Zerigo.

Damian

I use a pile of LEB VPS:

Kansas City MO          768mb
Orlando FL              256mb
Fremont, CA             128mb
Jacksonville FL         512mb
Sittingbourne, UK       128mb
Los Angeles, CA         160mb
Adelaide, Australia     512mb
Manchester, UK          1024mb
Milan, Italy            128mb
Surrey, UK              256mb
Detroit, MI             128mb
Buffalo, NY             192mb
Charlotte, NC           128mb

All are OVZ, except for the Sittingbourne UK one using Xen. Works great.

Jack

@Damian what type of DNS service are you using?

Damian

@Jack: cpanel DNS only with bind9.

Working on switching over to PowerDNS with SQL back end. Cpanel's default of bind9 works fine, but doesn't scale well when you have a whole pile of zones:

root@web [/var/named]# ls -l | wc -l 14029

dominicl

I'm leaning towards PowerDNS at the moment as well....Now to find some LEB VPS's.

bdtech

How reliable is mysql replication? It seems to me like it would be a huge admin time suck as number of dns servers grows. All changes are made on the primary dns and replicated to slaves?

gbshouse

@bdtech - at least in our setup there is no such thing as primary DNS, we run cluster globally on 5 continents and it's replicating very fast

Damian

@bdtech said: How reliable is mysql replication? It seems to me like it would be a huge admin time suck as number of dns servers grows. All changes are made on the primary dns and replicated to slaves?

"All changes are made on the primary dns and replicated to slaves?" this. If the primary mysql server dies for some reason, all of the child nodes are able to keep running on their dataset.

The only thing I don't like about Powerdns is that it doesn't have any functionality to self-cache answers, which means every time it gets a query, it needs to reference the SQL database for the answer. I'm compensating for this by having the mysql cache settings quite high.

gbshouse

@Damian - you can setup PDNS to cache the responses for a specific time

HalfEatenPie

@gbshouse: I think that's what he did when he said "I'm compensating for this by having the mysql cache settings quite high"

gbshouse

@HalfEatenPie - but the data is cached inside PDNS not MySQL from PDNS docs

3.1. Packet Cache PDNS by default uses the 'Packet Cache' to recognise identical questions and supply them with identical answers, without any further processing. The default time to live is 10 seconds. It has been observed that the utility of the packet cache increases with the load on your nameserver. Not all backends may benefit from the packetcache. If your backend is memory based and does not lead to context switches, the packetcache may actually hurt performance. The size of the packetcache can be observed with /etc/init.d/pdns show packetcache-size