[nylug-talk] thoughts on distributed DNS?

[Joachim Rosenfeld]

hello,

I was recently tasked to redo the DNS at a company that is currently
outsourcing their DNS.

They are using a well-known provider, but they are getting raped on the
price -- think on the order of $10k/month. So they clearly need to move
to someone else.

(Also, the DNS provider in question uses very sleazy sales tactics to
get people to use their service -- they will call you up (or more
likely, your CTO) and say, "Hey, did you know your DNS guys are dropping
20% of your queries?")


I had initially told them they should set up their own DNS servers on
two Linux boxes and forget it, but they were hit with a DDOS attack a
few years ago which interfered severely with their DNS traffic until
they were able to mitigate it, so they are terrified of that scenario.

They only have about 15 domains and maybe 300 records total, but their 3
most popular domains get about 90 million queries per month.

The current idea is to setup a Linux box as an authoritative DNS server,
and then distribute the rest with Akamai's CDN. This is doable, but I am
told Akamai charges $2k/month for this (I haven't verified that though).

$2k/month is acceptable to them, but I think they can get just as much
resiliency for a lower price by going with someone else for CDN.

Any suggestions? Perhaps something similar to the Akamai setup, but with
a different CDN provider? Basically, what they want is to setup DNS and
not worry about it. The price is a factor, but not *that* much of a
factor.

thanks,
Joe