DNS migration and folks that don't play nice

[Python]

On Mon, 2006-04-10 at 10:04 -0400, Cole Tuininga wrote:
> Preface - 
> 
> The folks on the sys-admin list are talking about the migration of
> services from the older server to the newer server.  Of course, one of
> the issues that's come up is DNS.  This led to the following snippet:
> 
> On Sat, 2006-04-08 at 09:04 -0400, wrote:
> > > Well, there's at least one easy workaround for that, aside from the
> > > obvious (shorten TTL ahead of time, to force fast propagation).
> > 
> > Unfortunately, shortening the TTL doesn't work for clients (like AOL)
> > that cache/maintain their own DNS.
> 
> I was curious - how do folks in general deal with this?  

(Context is HTTP and SMTP servers)
Usually, I will try to run in parallel for up to 10 days.  I'll also
watch the logs a bit to see how quickly traffic dries up at the old
site.  When serving static pages, this is pretty painless.  It is also
fairly easy to migrate data that gets posted to a RDBMS on the old site.

The last site I moved, HowsYourBaby worked quite smoothly.  The old site
usage dried up in a day except for 1 laggard who showed up about 5 days
later.  (Could not find the record now, but I think that's accurate.)
I pulled off the laggard data from the old DB and reposted it to the new
DB after the 10 day wait.

Yes this means paying double hosting fees for a month.

> While AOL can
> certainly constitute a large number of users, my inclination is to say
> "hell with 'em".  If they can't conform to proper netiquette, why should
> I be bending over backwards to support them?
> 
> I was just curious to get other folks' take on this quasi-philosophical
> point.

-- 
Lloyd Kvam
Venix Corp