Thoughts on a large-scale DNS server...

[Matthew D. Fuller]

Just a few comments...

On Tue, Jun 28, 2005 at 10:42:59AM -0400 I heard the voice of
John Von Essen, and lo! it spake thus:
> 
> The plan is to have 3 core machines. One is the master, and gets its
> zone files created from local cvs exports. The other two are slaves,
> and do zone transfers from the master.

I've converted for most non-trivial configs to using external
synchronization (rsync or rdist or the like, generally) instead of
zone transfers.  I'd just make them all 'masters' with their own local
copies; that reduces your failure points (or at least moves them
around a bit).


> The first question is, do I have enough CPU/Memory. Keep in mind
> these machines will nothing but DNS.

CPU?  Sure.  Memory?  Quite probably.  Even if you assume each zone
will eat 64k of memory (which I think it a terribly high guess; at
least double what you'd really expect), 11,000 zones will burn less
than 700 meg.  I'd probably be tempted to double the memory, just
because memory is cheap&easy, but I doubt you'll be hitting a wall on
it.



-- 
Matthew Fuller     (MF4839)   |  fullermd at over-yonder.net
Systems/Network Administrator |  http://www.over-yonder.net/~fullermd/
           On the Internet, nobody can hear you scream.