There shouldn't be any need to.I host my own primary nameserver here. My question then, is, how is the best way to handle a quick tranfer of DNS?
If you host the primary nameserver, you've got complete control over it. If something happens with your ISP, all you need to do is change the DNS to point to different IPs. If the IP of your DNS server changes, that will be more difficult to deal with (as it requires making a change with your registrar and waiting for it to propagate), but DNS servers performing lookups on your domain will still go to the secondary DNS server(s). So DNS won't be "down" (just slow).
First, dump Network Solutions before they dump you. They're bad. I won't go into details, but a search at Google ought to turn up lots of hits about NetSol.Is there a way to register a "virtual" primary nameserver (we use Network Solutions) but not have it active?
You can only register live nameservers with your registrar (technically, you could put in non-live servers, but that's a very bad practice). But, you shouldn't need to register "virtual" nameservers that aren't active.
Not if it is set up properly.Just having the backup provider would help, but we would still experience a lot of downtime until the rest of the world knew how to get in touch with us.
For example, if you have a primary nameserver of 192.0.2.53 and a backup nameserver of 192.168.0.53 somewhere else on the Internet (or locally, but with a different ISP), and your main ISP vanishes (*poof*), your backup nameserver will still handle DNS requests. The problem is that it will give out IPs that belong to the now-dead ISP. However, if this happens again, you just make a change on the primary DNS server, and figure out a way to get the backup nameserver to obtain the changed zone information (perhaps temporarily hard-coding the new IP with the HOSTS file).
Please see my "dump NetSol" comment above. :)If anyone has ever used Network Solutions before, you will know that changing an IP address of a primary nameserver when you don't have internet access is worse than undergoing a full background investigation by the FBI.
Switching to another registrar *from* NetSol can sometimes be very difficult, but can be done. Once out of NetSol's reach, it shouldn't be difficult to change the IP of a nameserver. And, even while one of them is changed, the backup nameserver will be reachable, so your DNS won't be down.
-Scott
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