[nsd-users] Building Up DNS server with NSD; Migration

Frank Habicht geier at geier.ne.tz
Sun Jun 6 20:42:30 UTC 2021


Hi Mukul,

it is good you shared some detail.

DNS has good ways of implementing redundancies and achieving high
availability.

You can set up new separate servers and test their functionality
thoroughly [like Kaulkwappe described], even before telling any outsider
about them.
I'm just afraid getting the necessary public IP (IPv4) addresses might
be an issue for you - if your organisation really only has 16  --  [1]

One of the important ways towards high availability is to *not* put all
the authoritative name servers in the same place (ie all eggs in the
same basket).
This seems to be the case currently [2].
More elaborate advise is in RFC2182 -- [3].

It looks like all current authoritative servers are in direct sequential
IP addresses and one could guess that probably the outage of one router
could cause all of them to become unreachable.
I'd try to get a friendly organisation or your upstream provider to
provide secondary name service for your domain(s). with automatic
updates of zone data / changes from you to that server.

This is of course not what you were asking (how to run *your* servers),
but valid consideration for the person/team responsible for the overall
availability of the domain in DNS.

But since this is the mailing list for NSD, I should mention that
another mailing list:
https://lists.dns-oarc.net/mailman/listinfo/dns-operations
would be more appropriate for the general DNS questions.

Regards,
Frank

[1]
inetnum:        14.139.250.80 - 14.139.250.95

[2]
dig sgsits.ac.in. ns

[3]
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2182



On 06/06/2021 22:16, Mukul Shukla via nsd-users wrote:
> Dear All,
> 
> Let me give me a little background as to what I am trying to achieve.
> 
> 1. The domain which I want the Authoritative Name serve  to serve for is
> sgsits.ac.in <http://sgsits.ac.in>.
> 2. The ERNET India (ac.in <http://ac.in>) is the domain name registrar
> for academic institutes here in India.
> 3. We are hosting our Website, Email and Moodle servers for which right
> now djbdns is acting as a authoritative name server.
> 4. Although, djbdns is working fine since last ten years (I must say its
> a brilliantly crafted  DNS server), it lacks some security features
> which are now a must (eg. DNSSEC).
> 5. I want to migrate this name server to NSD, with al the security
> feature and high availability so that it meets the current requirements.
> 
> Can anybody please tell me how to plan for this migration so that I have
> a minimum downtime. Moreover, I want to build a setup with NSD so that
> it runs smoothly for the next 10 years. Of course want to know how to
> keep on upgrading will be an issue, I need to consider.
> 
> I am reading the only source of information, the man pages on NLNET's
> website, although there are few tutorial available (eg. Calomel)
> 
> Thank you all.
> 
> Mukul
> 
> 
> 
> On Mon, Jun 7, 2021 at 12:02 AM Mukul Shukla <mukulmanet at gmail.com
> <mailto:mukulmanet at gmail.com>> wrote:
> 
>     Hi Ondřej,
> 
>     Thanks for such encouraging words.
>     Gave me a lot of confidence.
>     It's decided at my end. I will try to migrate my University DNS
>     authoritative setup to much improved NSD setup, of course with the
>     help of all the members here.
>     Thanks again.
> 
>     Mukul
> 
>     On Sun, Jun 6, 2021 at 10:57 PM Ondřej Surý <ondrej at sury.org
>     <mailto:ondrej at sury.org>> wrote:
> 
>         Hi Mukul,
> 
>         don’t worry - the community here is friendly and helpful and you
>         should not run into any hard problems. Take it as an opportunity
>         to learn something new!
> 
>         Ondřej
>         - former Knot DNS team lead
>         - current BIND 9 team lead
>         --
>         Ondřej Surý <ondrej at sury.org <mailto:ondrej at sury.org>> (He/Him)
> 
>>         On 6. 6. 2021, at 18:50, Mukul Shukla via nsd-users
>>         <nsd-users at lists.nlnetlabs.nl
>>         <mailto:nsd-users at lists.nlnetlabs.nl>> wrote:
>>
>>         
>>
>>         Dear All,
>>
>>         There are very  few articles/tutorials on NSD. This is making
>>         me nervous to adapt it for a long use. If I am stuck, there is
>>         no help to refer to. Man pages are just not sufficient for the
>>         people like me who don't have much experience of the system
>>         administration and implementing DNS Authoritative Server in
>>         particular. Other DNS implementations have very good manuals.
>>         The kind of software NSD is, there should have been books
>>         written on them.
>>
>>         Mukul
>>
>>         On Sun, Jun 6, 2021 at 9:06 PM Anand Buddhdev via nsd-users
>>         <nsd-users at lists.nlnetlabs.nl
>>         <mailto:nsd-users at lists.nlnetlabs.nl>> wrote:
>>
>>             On 06/06/2021 16:26, mj via nsd-users wrote:
>>
>>             Hi MJ,
>>
>>             > Actually: we are in a similar situation. We're currently
>>             running bind9,
>>             > and were interested in to switching to NSD for the
>>             authorative dns
>>             > services, but it seems that you have to compile newer
>>             releases (with
>>             > security fixes etc) yourself, or there is a repo
>>             somewhere we're missing?
>>             >
>>             > We're on debian 10. It recommended to simply install the
>>             NSD that debian
>>             > comes with, and rely on debian for the security fixes?
>>
>>             Debian packages are often well behind upstream releases.
>>             For example,
>>             Debian 10 (buster) still has NSD 4.1.26, whereas the
>>             upstream version is
>>             4.3.6.
>>
>>             However, for Debian, there's usually a repository called
>>             backports. If
>>             you enable it, you can get newer versions of packages. For
>>             example,
>>             "buster-backports" currently has NSD 4.3.5 in it. You
>>             could also enable
>>             the "experimental" repo and get the latest 4.3.6 release.
>>
>>             Regards,
>>             Anand
>>             _______________________________________________
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>>             nsd-users at lists.nlnetlabs.nl
>>             <mailto:nsd-users at lists.nlnetlabs.nl>
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>>             <https://lists.nlnetlabs.nl/mailman/listinfo/nsd-users>
>>
>>         _______________________________________________
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> 
> 
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