Planned, Sporadic Downtime between 5/26 and 6/3

[bmwaudio]

GL!!! i am a server admin as well for a major hospital, let me know if you need anything!!!!

[danp]

FYI we will be moving the PAFOA.ORG name servers from GoDaddy to Amazon in the next few hours.

This should be a completely transparent transition and none of you should notice a difference.

This isn't the complete server transfer, just one of the steps. Not that exciting unfortunately.

For the nerds watching this thread however: Amazon CloudFormation is one of the most awesome things I've worked with in a while. I've been using AWS for my personal hosting for a while, but haven't tried CF until now.

[danp]

Name servers are switched.

If things went well, you can read this. If not, well then you can't.

As of right now my hope is that I can have all of PAFOA running in a staging environment at Amazon by EOD Wednesday the 30th and actually cut the servers over the evening of Thursday the 31st.

We'll see if my plans and reality agree.

BTW, if anyone out there is bored and technical, I'd be curious to see if you could do a `dig ns pafoa.org` or `host -t ns pafoa.org` and confirm that you see NS records for the domain pointing to awsdns hosts.

[FNG19]

`dig ns pafoa.org`

Ask and ye shall receive!

$ dig ns pafoa.org
...
;; ANSWER SECTION:
pafoa.org.		1314	IN	NS	ns22.domaincontrol.com.
pafoa.org.		1314	IN	NS	ns21.domaincontrol.com.

$ host -t ns pafoa.org
pafoa.org name server ns22.domaincontrol.com.
pafoa.org name server ns21.domaincontrol.com.

I even re-started my caching name server (doesn't save state between starts) and got the same results.

[FNG19]

And, from another server I have access to that has absolutely zero reason to ever look up pafoa:

$ host -t ns pafoa.org
pafoa.org name server ns22.domaincontrol.com.
pafoa.org name server ns21.domaincontrol.com.

$ dig ns pafoa.org
...
;; ANSWER SECTION:
pafoa.org.		1026	IN	NS	ns22.domaincontrol.com.
pafoa.org.		1026	IN	NS	ns21.domaincontrol.com.

;; ADDITIONAL SECTION:
ns22.domaincontrol.com.	170741	IN	A	208.109.255.11
ns21.domaincontrol.com.	170741	IN	A	216.69.185.11

[danp]

And, from another server I have access to that has absolutely zero reason to ever look up pafoa:

$ host -t ns pafoa.org
pafoa.org name server ns22.domaincontrol.com.
pafoa.org name server ns21.domaincontrol.com.

$ dig ns pafoa.org
...
;; ANSWER SECTION:
pafoa.org.		1026	IN	NS	ns22.domaincontrol.com.
pafoa.org.		1026	IN	NS	ns21.domaincontrol.com.

;; ADDITIONAL SECTION:
ns22.domaincontrol.com.	170741	IN	A	208.109.255.11
ns21.domaincontrol.com.	170741	IN	A	216.69.185.11

Thank you, that shows the NS still at GoDaddy. So far I've only found one server that has received the updated NS records, however it can still reach everything and we're all still here, so I guess that's good.

[FNG19]

Thank you, that shows the NS still at GoDaddy. So far I've only found one server that has received the updated NS records, however it can still reach everything and we're all still here, so I guess that's good.

FWIW, the conventional wisdom is (or at least used to be) to reduce TTL's on DNS records to something incredibly small (say, 30-60 seconds on up to about 10 minutes) prior to doing a NS move, and making this change more than $USUAL_TTL prior to the move. This ensures that every nameserver out there that honors TTL's without overriding them will be forced to get the new NS information almost as soon as the change is made (or at their next lookup, whichever is later). The new server, of course, has $USUAL_TTL as its TTL.

Doing this helps propagation of the new information at the cost of increased load on your old name server until the new information propagates and the new server starts holding its own.

[mjfletcher]

Name servers are switched.

If things went well, you can read this. If not, well then you can't.

As of right now my hope is that I can have all of PAFOA running in a staging environment at Amazon by EOD Wednesday the 30th and actually cut the servers over the evening of Thursday the 31st.

We'll see if my plans and reality agree.

BTW, if anyone out there is bored and technical, I'd be curious to see if you could do a `dig ns pafoa.org` or `host -t ns pafoa.org` and confirm that you see NS records for the domain pointing to awsdns hosts.

Dig Results

; <<>> DiG 9.8.1-P1 <<>> ns pafoa.org
;; global options: +cmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 38982
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 4, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;pafoa.org. IN NS

;; ANSWER SECTION:
pafoa.org. 172748 IN NS ns-407.awsdns-50.com.
pafoa.org. 172748 IN NS ns-674.awsdns-20.net.
pafoa.org. 172748 IN NS ns-1086.awsdns-07.org.
pafoa.org. 172748 IN NS ns-1796.awsdns-32.co.uk.

;; Query time: 45 msec
;; SERVER: 127.0.0.1#53(127.0.0.1)
;; WHEN: Sun May 27 22:13:05 2012
;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 164

Host results

pafoa.org name server ns-407.awsdns-50.com.
pafoa.org name server ns-674.awsdns-20.net.
pafoa.org name server ns-1086.awsdns-07.org.
pafoa.org name server ns-1796.awsdns-32.co.uk.

[danp]

FWIW, the conventional wisdom is (or at least used to be) to reduce TTL's on DNS records to something incredibly small (say, 30-60 seconds on up to about 10 minutes) prior to doing a NS move, and making this change more than $USUAL_TTL prior to the move. This ensures that every nameserver out there that honors TTL's without overriding them will be forced to get the new NS information almost as soon as the change is made (or at their next lookup, whichever is later). The new server, of course, has $USUAL_TTL as its TTL.

Doing this helps propagation of the new information at the cost of increased load on your old name server until the new information propagates and the new server starts holding its own.

Yeah I reduced all the TTLs earlier in the week, and all DNS entries for pafoa.org are set to 300s on the new NS until after I do the infrastructure switchover later this week.

The real fun part will be that since the DNS configuration is automated as part of CloudFormation, for a moment before I do the switchover I actually have to remove all of the A/CNAME records for pafoa.org. Haven't yet found a way to avoid that one.

[ErSwnn]

If it dosen't work and pafoa is no more where do you guys want to meet?
I suggest DCDaultons house. He seems like a realy nice guy and I hear he has great get togethers.

JK Good luck Dan.

At the bridge. If this site goes down I have no doubt it is a government conspiracy and the final straw.