Zerigo

Upgrades to our Global DNS Network

We’re very excited to announce big upgrades to our global DNS network today.

Earlier this year we set out to review our current DNS network and asked ourselves several questions: How can we improve overall service? What changes do we need to make to support our continued growth? What can we do to improve the resiliency of our network?

We identified several goals:

• Locate nameservers in cities that are key bandwidth hubs.
• Connect our nameservers to more networks and providers.
• Increase capacity and make it easier to add even more.
• Improve overall network resiliency.
• Slave nameserver functions should be operationally separate from DNS query resolution functions. (This alone would have avoided most of the partial outage on June 9th.)
• Upgrade other aspects of our nameserver deployment to prepare for the future.

To this end, we are making the following changes:

1. Adding DNS service in Dallas, Texas, USA; Washington, DC, USA; and Amsterdam, Netherlands. All three of these locations are significant hubs for internet traffic.

The new locations all meet several criteria for our future plans—covering our continued growth as well as new features we intend to offer. The chosen datacenters all have significant networks and fiber connections which will offer better connectivity and lower latencies to a larger number of end users.

All three of the new locations are replacing existing locations:

• b.ns.zerigo.net — St. Louis → Washington, DC
• d.ns.zerigo.net — Denver 2 → Dallas
• e.ns.zerigo.net — Vienna → Amsterdam

2. Moving slave nameserver functions and making them operationally independent of normal DNS resolution. To facilitate this, both of our official slave zone transfer servers will receive new IPs (and one will be moved to one of the new datacenters). DNS query resolution for slave zones/domains will continue to be processed by our standard production nameservers.

How does this affect you?

Unfortunately, changes of this scope require changing the IPs of the relocated nameservers. Depending on how you use Zerigo’s services, you may or may not need to make any changes on your own.

We’ve posted two additional articles with detailed information on the changes:

• Changes for Standard and Standard with Master service and/or Custom/vanity nameservers.
• Changes for Slave only service.

If you use our Standard or Standard with Master services and do not use custom nameservers (your domain is configured to use “a.ns.zerigo.net” and so on), then no changes are necessary on your part. We’re able to handle everything for you. The extra articles may be informative, but are not critical.

If you use custom/vanity nameservers, please be sure to read the first article.

If you use our slave service, be sure to read the second article. If you also use custom/vanity nameservers, read both.

Additional thoughts

As we noted in Wednesday’s post about the partial DNS service outage, we already had a project in place that would significantly reduce the risk of another outage like yesterday’s. This is that project and we’re pleased and grateful that we were already so far along and that we are able to begin the deployment phase today.

We will also be sending out email to everyone who we believe has to make one or more changes to their domain and/or master server configuration. The extra articles mentioned above have all the necessary information, however; so there is no need to wait on that email if you haven’t received it yet.

We considered the possibility of making these changes one at a time, spread out over several weeks. However, because some customers could end up making multiple changes that way, it seemed better to do everything at once.

After the changes, our global nameserver network will look like this:

• a.ns.zerigo.net – Denver, USA
• b.ns.zerigo.net – Washington, DC, USA
• c.ns.zerigo.net – London, UK
• d.ns.zerigo.net – Dallas, USA
• e.ns.zerigo.net – Amsterdam, NL

To everyone who made it this far, thanks for reading!

As always, if you have questions or comments, please send us an email.