1

Is there a way to have a dns backup records? I know with MX records you can put in backup mail servers.

What my goal is that when my Windows Server is shut down, that the requests are then forwarded to my linux server which will say "be back soon". We are running Windows iiS7 and have a script to restart windows every night at 1 am.

I dont want the visitors to get a not found error.

Is there a quick and dirty way to do this without using a DNS service like zerigo which has an API, or having to setup a reverse proxy?

Frank
  • 119
  • 3
  • 11

2 Answers2

2

DNS is not the way to go. You have a Time To Live on your DNS records and changing the DNS record will take at least the TTL time. Setting the TTL to a small number will increase the load on your DNS servers and some dns request servers might not honor small TTL's.

One option is to have a firewall in front that can redirect the traffic to your linux box while the IIS server restarts which you can do in your crontab.

Why do you restart the server? It might be quicker just to restart IIS.

Francois Wolmarans
  • 1,590
  • 10
  • 14
  • 1
    The TTL issue is even worse, considering client machines can and do cache DNS entries for as long as they bloody well please. – EightBitTony Jun 08 '12 at 17:17
0

The best solution to this is to use a two node cluster and a heartbeat in house. When the first server goes offline the second can take over a virtual shared IP (which is what the site is hosted on).

The issue in doing this is in your situation is that that most products are designed to run on either two Windows or two Linux systems.

Tim Brigham
  • 15,545
  • 10
  • 75
  • 115