[bitfolk] Deprecation of nameserver.net secondary DNS servers

Hi, If you don't rely on BitFolk to provide secondary DNS servers for you then you can ignore the rest of this email. For a little while now there have been some intermittent issues with the nameserver.net secondary DNS servers (sou.nameserver.net, phl.nameserver.net, sjc.nameserver.net). As you may know, these are provided by a third party and I have no direct access to them, which means that I have had to rely on others to resolve these problems. It's become clear that it's no longer appropriate or sensible for BitFolk to freeload the nameserver.net service, so I am deprecating use of the nameserver.net servers. I have added one more BitFolk DNS server on a Slicehost virtual server in St. Louis, Missouri, USA. BitFolk has had it for over a year, I use it for various other things and am happy with the stability. I will be adding one or two more when I have the opportunity. Probably one in continental Europe and another somewhere else. In looking at adding new servers I also came to the conclusion that the "ns$x.$location.bitfolk.com" naming scheme wasn't a good idea since it creates the expectation that a server actually is in $location. Servers do move over time through replacement or just having a better deal elsewhere, and changing nameserver names in zone files and registries can't happen regularly. Therefore I have decided to switch to: a.authns.bitfolk.com b.authns.bitfolk.com c.authns.bitfolk.com I may later add a d.authns.bitfolk.com but after that I will instead focus on growing each of the four clusters. Therefore this set of server/cluster names should be stable; you will have to trust that they are sufficiently widespread. I won't be removing any of the zones that are currently using the nameserver.net servers, I just won't be adding new ones to them. If your zones have nameserver.net servers in them then you may like to update them as described here: http://bitfolk.com/secondary_dns.html but they shouldn't stop working so there isn't any great rush. The same goes for the old ns0.lon / ns0.sfo nameserver names; these will continue to work so there isn't any requirement to update your existing zone files. If you do make changes then don't forget to update your registrar records as well. When you ask for a domain to be added to the BitFolk secondaries, a.authns.bitfolk.com slaves it from you. As soon as you add a.authns.bitfolk.com to your list of nameservers then all other BitFolk DNS servers will grab a copy from each other. You can use as many or as few of the servers as you wish but all zones will be added to all servers. I have monitoring in place against your master server and on all of the BitFolk servers to check that the domains are being served. I will later add checks that they all agree on the serial number too. If you have any further questions feel free to ask here or off-list. Cheers, Andy -- http://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting Has Jurassic Park taught us nothing? -- pfilandr