Hi,

I have a rather unique problem and am hoping someone can suggest a fix.

I had a customer come to me a while ago wanting to set up a site selling domain names - as part of it he wanted me to add all the domains he had for sale onto our DNS server so that they would all point at one IP address, on there was a 'This domain is for sale' type page that forwarded to their proper site.

The problem is that as his business has grown so have the number of domains, over 1500 now, all being served by our DNS server.

The real kicker is that this guy is buying the domains that were previously owned as they become available - this results in loads of calls to the DNS server from people trying to reach or send mail to the domains believing that they are still the old sites ( hope you're still following me ;) )

We're now getting a ridiculous number of DNS queries (around 100.000 per day) - christ knows what bandwidth this is using up apart from the load on the server.

Question is - does anyone know a way I can arrange things differently ?

Any ideas appreciated . . .

Originally posted by flatron
We're now getting a ridiculous number of DNS queries (around 100.000 per day) - christ knows what bandwidth this is using up apart from the load on the server.

I'm not Christ, but if you're receiving 100,000 DNS queries/day then it will not be using more than 1 GB/month of bandwidth. DNS is not exactly bandwidth-intensive.

As for the load on your server, I doubt it is significant, but if you're worried you should switch to djbdns. (If you are using djbdns, the server load is definitely not significant; djbdns has been demonstrated to reliably handle over 10,000 queries per second).

Ta for the info - under 1GB a month is fine, what he pays more than covers that.

I forgot to mention that the server in question is Win2k running Simple DNS Plus, though I presume the estimates you made will still be roughly applicable.

Thanks.

Originally posted by flatron
I forgot to mention that the server in question is Win2k running Simple DNS Plus, though I presume the estimates you made will still be roughly applicable.

The bandwidth should be the same; I expect that the cpu load would be several times higher than with djbdns/BSD, but it should still be insignificant. (You should be able to verify this easily by looking at the cpu time consumed by the DNS server process).

Doh do I feel dumb ;)

Yeah just checked the cpu use for sdns and its flickering between 0 and 1 percent.

Again thanks for your help.