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Splitting DNS settings to multiple servers to reduce downtime during failover

Quartiz.com is hosted on a Linux server based in Pennsylvania, USA and from time to time, the server needs to be upgraded and rebooted for maintenance. Mostly admins do this during the wee hours, but our company has offices and clients in six different countries across many time zones and we experience downtime during business hours and we cannot afford to have even have a few minutes of downtime. Is there a way to split the DNS settings (I know there can be more than one server names and priority) such a way that if one of the server goes down, another one’s DNS setting is being picked up automatically! To make matters worse, there is an interactive quote form for potential prospects to contact us via Quartiz.com and we store this data in a table on this web server. If we failover to a different server, how could I sync the databases? Has someone resolved such a case successfully? We have our own data centers for running our clients’ applications with redundancy set up, but bringing our own site and prospect response emails to own data center is a security and management issue, without having to separate client sites and ours.
Really really really appreciate a DNS setting based solution (based on server priority) on this one, even if we have to manually sync databases after failover.

Quartiz.com
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4 posts since Nov 2011
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To add to the complexit of domain and site routing, quartiz.com's mail and website requests are separated using and MX and an A record. Mail is hosted on exchange server, whereas website is on a Linux one. I am not sure if this will limit the number of servers where the requests can be routed to. I am not sure how many servers can be listed an A record.

If anyone has knowledge on this info, please post.

Thank you,

Quartiz.com
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Hi,

You can specify multiple DNS records but for failover try to setup 2 or more A records may be for example 1st for india and 2nd for US......and specify TTL time like 30 to 60 seconds if one of A record failed to contact then after TTL expires on any then another A record will be called.....

--
Manoj

manojsamtani
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This article has been dead for over three months

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