Why not have your a records such that the web site is midwestls.com? Most browsers will fail over to adding www if that first one fails. This would allow you to have a second record for www.midwestls.com. Then tell everyone to use "midwestls.com" and you then have something that can play the failover role at a totally different location or at the same location.
One day someone will create a means of setting priorities for DNS (something like those used for mx records) that would allow someone to have a failover environment that is only accessible when the master site is unavailable. Perhaps Internic or the DNRs can implement it such that the tertiary DNS servers only come into play when the primary is bogging down or is dead. It's either that or we all work on getting budgets that can support fully redundant failover environments, including ISPs, gateways and backbones. Danny -----Original Message----- From: Corey Hudson [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, January 27, 2005 9:07 AM To: GnatBox Users Group Subject: [gb-users] Multiple external gateways We have had 2 Internet outages over the past year on our T1. Both outages had us down for hours. So, I decided to bring in a secondary connection using our local cable company. I thought that it would be better to use another type of network using a completely different type of network. The idea of bringing in another T1 wasn't appealing. It would still come into our building from the same local CO, which would most likely mean within the same physical cable. Not good, especially with all of the road widening going on here. Currently, I have our internal network accessing our service network and the Internet through the secondary (cable) network. The "outside world" accesses our service network (website) through the primary (T1) gateway. Since we have complete control our internal network DNS/DHCP addressing, changing from one gateway to another is not a problem. However, providing a backup external gateway is another problem. I looked at GTA's high available option and just scratch my head. This doesn't seem to be an ideal solution since it is still only using one external gateway. In the 10 years we've used firewalls they have never failed. Yet the external network has. So, placing safeguards at a point that is probably the least point of failure between our customers and our website, e-mail and ftp server doesn't help us. I'm I missing something here? I always had another firewall on standby that I could switch out in minutes, and I realize there are companies out there that can't be down for even seconds but when the external network is down for hours what good is having 2 firewalls in a high availability configuration? Enough about the problem and GTA options. What I came up with was to provide another URL to our customers. So, our primary site would be www.midwestls.com and our secondary site would be www.midwestls2.com (not yet set up). We would notify our customers of the alternate URL if they have a problem reaching us through the primary URL. Each ISP would provide us with the appropriate external DNS for each URL. Is there a better method to doing this? Obviously, the ideal situation would be to provide our customers with one URL that would be a lot more dynamic. ------------------------------------------------------ To unsubscribe: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Archive: http://archives.gnatbox.com/gb-users/ ------------------------------------------------------ To unsubscribe: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Archive: http://archives.gnatbox.com/gb-users/
