[nsd-users] Seeking advice for deploying an anycast cluster

[Niall O'Reilly]

First, the advice from Ondřej Caletka is worth heeding.

On 3 Jan 2020, at 17:04, Daniel Corbe via nsd-users wrote:

> The main issue I'm running into is I want to keep the primary's
> interface to the world as simple as possible.

Fair enough.

> At maximum, two hosts to communicate with.

If this is a limit you have freely chosen, I suspect you may be
importing inapplicable experience from another problem domain,
and would advise reviewing your choice.

NSD is well capable of, and easily configured for, handling much
greater fanout than two. In case the anycast cloud is really
enormous, it may be sensible to use some intermediate distribution
servers, as described below using the term "hidden slave".

> So for that to work, I'd need to somehow
> cluster my NSD instances together or I'd need some sort of proxy
> server that can listen for incoming NOTIFYs and then distribute them
> to the rest of the constellation.

Any of the authoritative name-server codes is designed to do exactly
this kind of proxying. The old-fashioned terminology for a server
which does only this, and which is not announced to the world in an
NS record, is "hidden slave". Setting one of these up is particularly
easy to do with (perhaps another instance of) NSD. Other choices might
be BIND (named), Knot, or PowerDNS.

An NSD-based hidden slave needs to refer to the upstream master
in 'allow-notify' and 'request-xfr' configuration directives and to
refer to each dependent downstream server in 'notify' and 'provide-xfr'
directives. Of course, the downstream servers must be configured
correspondingly to accept NOTIFY and request a zone transfer when
appropriate.

> I don't think any of the usual
> suspects (nginx, haproxy, etc) have that capability out of the box.
> Do they?

I don't know: modules of all kinds abound; but it would be really
extraordinary to use such a web proxy as part of a DNS infrastructure.

> On Fri, Jan 3, 2020 at 3:49 AM Ondřej Caletka via nsd-users
> <nsd-users at lists.nlnetlabs.nl> wrote:
  [...]
>>
>> This is usually solved by sending NOTIFY messages not to the 
>> anycasted
>> cluster address but to all the unique address of each cluster node 
>> instead.

I may have mentioned already that this advice from Ondřej Caletka
is worth heeding.

Niall O'Reilly