DNS post mortem

jsf jfreeman at gmail.com
Tue Aug 9 10:01:00 EDT 2005


First of all thanks to those who jumped in offering to help... It's
greatly appreciated.

So, just to recap.. Here's the story...

Back in like 1998 I was living in Boston.  I wanted to run a server at
my home but finding a way to do that, and finding something better
than 56k dialup at the time was, as I recall, challenging.

I worked, for a while, at a startup and became friendly with the guy
who ran the startup's ISP which was also a startup. That guy (his name
is Barton Bruce and he's a really old school *nix and telephony guy)
suggested the following:

"Buy a netgear RT328  ISDN Modem/Router.  Have Verizon install an ISDN
line to your home.  Under no circumstances tell them it's for data..
Just tell them you need multiple voice lines and you know this is an
economical way to provision them.

Once you have the line installed, setup the modem to dial my NOC (a
local number in the next town).  Set the modem up for data over voice,
here are the IP settings etc.."

So basically, Barton set me up with a situation where I was making a
never ending phone call to an ISDN modem on his network at his NOC, he
was assigning my modem/router an IP and I had a bunch other IP
addresses to provision to my workstation(s) as I saw fit.

It wasn't fast but it was sweet and I could do pretty much whatever I
wanted... He set up pointer records in his DNS so that I was allowed
to be primary DNS for any domains I owned he and would be secondary (I
think that's how it was)..

Anyway... Before I moved to NY I pared the whole setup down to one server... 

This past weekend I brought that server down here and needed to switch
things around so that all of domains I own that I really care about
(that's about 15 domains) would still work.  Some of them are
registered with NetSol and the rest with Joker.

I eventually figured out the following solution:

1) I had Speakeasy (my new ISP) setup nameservice for ONE of my
domains (I'm only entitled to one with the level of service I've
procured).  I created the A records I needed for that domain on
Speakeasy's administrative interface.


2) I logged into NetSol and changed DNS for all of my domains
registered there so that DNS is provided by NetSol.  Once I did that I
was able to put in forwarding A records for www, mail, etc... For the
domains hosted there.

3) I logged into Joker and did essentially the same thing.

Everything's working.

I did run into some snags on Joker's site.. For some reason the system
was crapping out whenever I'd try to edit DNS for any of my .org
domain names.
I sent in a support ticket and this morning everything seems to be
working as expected.

And that's it.

I guess, at this point, I'm not really providing DNS for any of my
domains, yet they're all working and all pointing to my box..

I guess a lot has changed since 1998... 

;-)

Thanks again.

J.



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