In theory it should be seamless…

• lprent
• 13 years ago
• Categories: admin, The Standard

Shifting the site to a GeoDNS with fallback capabilities this evening*. This involves changing the domain name server addresses again. Now like last time this is meant to be a seamless shift. However that may or may not be the case.

Last time there were some quite ISP’s with interesting ways of interpreting what a time to live meant (10 minutes means ten minutes damnit – not 10 hours). The replicated slave server turned out to have a few interesting issues and essentially failed. So there were some poor souls who were deprived of the site for quite a few hours.

This time, the replication has been running for the last week. I fixed the last few bugs in it last night. The DNS is starting to dynamically flip people to different servers as I write. In theory it should be seamless… If it isn’t then I’ll apologize in advance.

Now is a good time to cook dinner with the iPad in hand to monitor the change.

* In essence this means that when you request thestandard.org.nz, the domain name server will detect where you are asking from, and divert you to the nearest operational server.

For anyone in New Zealand, Australia, and Oceania this means your page comes from Auckland. Everyone else (including most of the spiders and spambots) will come from San Diego and not through the crowded Southern Cross cables. The Auckland server will lose about half of its weekday traffic.

It also means that we can have NZ servers without worrying about nuisance issues. There is now a hot server running offshore running a same operating site with a second or so delay. Either server can run the full site albeit slowly. It is also possible to easily add other lower cost servers hooked into the same system.