Redirect or ?? 1

[mwidner]

After the recent hurricane, we were wondering if it is possible for our servers to have a backup on another server, NOT in a hurricane area. I believe this is called a Mirror. But, how would DNS know that our system was down and that it needed to redirect the user to our mirror site?

I may be totally off base on this, so forgive me. I appreciate any and all help and "redirection" with this issue.

mlw

 

[ShackDaddy]

You would want to create a backup/disaster plan which would include assigning someone with the task of updating the DNS records to point to the new remote location. It's a good idea to have a server that's not in your own building providing backup dns services for you, so that in the event that your primary dns server gets waxed, you still have a place that's handing out information to the public. If you were using someone like ZoneEdit.com for backup DNS (and mail) hosting, if your server got taken out, you could switch that backup DNS server from a secondary to a primary, change the A records to point at the mirrored location and you'd be live.

As for how you'd go about setting up that mirror, either have a company with a "hot spare" server waiting to go live (you pay by the month to keep it available), or build your own with a remote partner office using Double-Take:

http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Double-Take.cfm.

One company I know of leases a private T-1 link to one of their remote developer's homes and has a second server there mirrored using Double-Take, and if there is a disaster at headquarters, their web product will be publically available from that developer's home.

Hope this helps,

ShackDaddy