Managing Mission - Critical Domains and DNS

External secondaries

When specifically setting out to add DNS redundancy via secondaries or tertiaries, it is best to select a completely separate DNS operating entity for it, and then come up with a coherent methodology to federate your zones across those separate entities.

The easiest way is to simply setup AXFR/IXFR zone-transfer access to another set of nameservers operated by somebody else. This can be an informal ad-hoc arrangement with a peer or a commercial DNS provider that offers secondary DNS as a service.

One way to do this is to operate your own (hidden) primary and set up multiple mirrors to publish your zones.

The steps in setting this up, using BIND as an example, would be as follows:

1. Enable transfers of the zone to the external ...