Re: Repository services and budget

[Kent Crispin <kent@songbird.com>]

Jeff Williams allegedly said:
> 
[...]
> > I wouldn't.  I would keep a duplicate spare.  Two pentium machines.
> > Maybe $10000.
> 
>   Ok, that should be fine.  BUt they will need to be sharing drives at
> least.

For the ultimate in reliability, perhaps.  But with the scheme I'm 
using I don't think it is necessary.  But it certainly wouldn't hurt.

>   Well I was not talking about the machine being down, rather I was
> refering to a bad drive or a scheduled archive.  There should be
> no reason that the DNS is compleatly down.

The central server (which I called the "master") doesn't archive 
anything.  The average lifetime of data items on its disk should be 
less than a couple of hours.  If it goes down for more than two hours 
everything will have expired, so there is no point in rebuilding the 
data.  So what you do is keep it down for two hours when it goes 
down, so no conflicting certificates are generated.

>   Where are the Domain def's kept than?  Where is the DNS db itself?
> On a drive somewhere, correct?  I agree that there should be multipul
> servers for the zone.  But you did no include that in you previous post.

Nobody has so far talked about the actual nameservers.  In all 
scenarios the DNS servers have to be reliable; their databases files 
have to be carefully maintained, etc.  The algorithm I use 
capitalizes on the fact that we already must have a reliable, fault 
tolerant DB, namely DNS, available to us.  Once things are in DNS it 
is a requirement of *any* registry model that they be reliably 
maintained. 

-- 
Kent Crispin				"No reason to get excited",
kent@songbird.com,kc@llnl.gov		the thief he kindly spoke...
PGP fingerprint:   5A 16 DA 04 31 33 40 1E  87 DA 29 02 97 A3 46 2F