Bringing DNS In House

  • Thread starter Thread starter Darrel Lewis
  • Start date Start date
D

Darrel Lewis

Hello

We are currently thinking of bringing our externally
hosted DNS in house. We would like better control of
additions to our records and changes. Does any one know
what steps are involved with bringing the DNS in house.

We are also going to move away from our current ISP who
hosts our DNS. So we need to bring it in house and run it
concurently with the present system and then turn of our
current ISP and run with our new ISP on a diffrent ip
range.

Any help or direction appreciated.

Darrel Lewis
 
This is a question for your ISP. You should just be able to phone them up
(or send a fax most likely) asking them to redelegate to your own servers,
it's not a difficult process.

I think the best approach would be to make the change over to the new ISP
first, let the dust settle and make sure everything works and then ask them
to do the redelegation.
 
DL> Does any one know what steps are involved with
DL> bringing the DNS in house.

Yes.

DL> Any help or direction appreciated.

* Set up your own content DNS servers, listening on publically
reachable, and static, IP addresses.

<URL:http://homepages.tesco.net./~J.deBoynePollard/FGA/dns-server-roles.html#ContentIP>

* Move the content DNS service for your domain(s) from the old
content DNS servers run by your DNS hosting company to the new
content DNS servers run by you.

<URL:http://homepages.tesco.net./~J.deBoynePollard/FGA/dns-switching-content-servers.html>

If you cannot fulfil all of the criteria in the first step, then
you cannot bring the content DNS service for your domains in-house.
 
To make this work without any downtime, you are going to have to run both ISPs at the same time. Go ahead and get a new ISP signed on. You will need at
least two IP addresses to host your DNS, a requirement of the Internet. As soon as the new ISP is up and running and you have the two IPs for DNS, configure
a secondary on the new DNS servers and do a zone transfer from the old ISP. You may have to ask the old ISP to enable zone transfers on your zone before
this will work. Once that is complete, contact the Internic and have them update the SOA and NS records for your registered zone to reflect the new IP
addresses from the new ISP. Change the zone from a secondary to a Primary on one of the servers, this will be the server acting as the SOA for your zone.
Configure the second new server as a secondary to the primary. After a day or two, verify with the root servers that they are point to the new addresses for your
zone and turn off the old ISP. Simple enough? :-)

Some of this may have to be done by the old ISP. It all depends on who is registered as the Administrative contact for your domain name. If you registered it,
then there shouldn't be a problem. If the ISP registered it, then they own it and there may be some haggling need to take it back.

Thank you,
Mike Johnston
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This is the way I like and gives you most flexibility and control over time:
1) Get "ownership" of your domain name *first. If your email is not the
Admin contact, then figure out who the Registrar is for your domain name
(use whois) and have your ISP change the Admin email (and other info) to
you. They may charge a few bucks for this.
2) Once you "own" the domain name - your in control. You can change the NS
records at the Registrar (not an ISP) directly and the mostly any change
will take effect overnight and after all records "cache" out.
3) Point the two DNS NS records to your "inhouse" DNS public addresses.
4) If you don't want to manage two dns servers or don't want to, most good
Registrars include free DNS hosting with their yearly domain name
registration. I like godaddy.com or register.com - but there are many.

hth
--wjs, dns mvp
 
William Stacey said:
This is the way I like and gives you most flexibility and control over time:
1) Get "ownership" of your domain name *first. If your email is not the
Admin contact, then figure out who the Registrar is for your domain name
(use whois) and have your ISP change the Admin email (and other info) to
you. They may charge a few bucks for this.
Click to expand...

Excellent advice. Get ownership. Get listed as the
contacts (perhaps on a throw-away address because
you can expect spam.)
 
Agree 100%. Also, they are likely to have a better infrastructure, and you
don't have to allow that traffic into your firewall. Unless you're running a
1000-seat shop, I wouldn't bother hosting your own DNS.
 
"Lanwench [MVP - Exchange]"
Agree 100%. Also, they are likely to have a better infrastructure, and you
don't have to allow that traffic into your firewall. Unless you're running a
1000-seat shop, I wouldn't bother hosting your own DNS.
Click to expand...

Actually, I would turn it the other way - unless you running
a Large Public Webserver farm, I wouldn't bother.

Like one to four web servers, why bother?

Amazon or Yahoo might as well run their own DNS but they
are on the backbone and have a CREW to take care of JUST
the public servers 24/7.
 
Thanks to all of you who replied, the ideas and advice
have been vcery helpful


Thanks

Darrel Lewis
 
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