[MOBY-dev] DNS changes for biomoby.org beginning today - should have no noticeable effect

[Chris Dagdigian]

Hi folks,

All of open-bio DNS is outsourced to a third party except for  
biomoby.org for which we manage the DNS zone ourselves due to moby  
requirements for specialized SRV zone entries that our other provider  
can't handle.

The existing primary and secondary nameservers for biomoby.org are:

         7200    IN      NS      portal.open-bio.org.
         7200    IN      NS      pub.open-bio.org.

These also happen to be the same servers we are currently trying to  
"retire" in favor of newer servers running in a different datacenter  
colocation cage.

Last night I copied the biomoby.org zone file to our two new servers  
and activated service for them. The new machines are:

  (1) newportal.open-bio.org
  (2) dev.open-bio.org

This morning I edited the master nameserver list that  
NetworkSolutions holds for the domain to add those new servers at the  
top of the list.

Biomoby now has 4 dns servers; listed in the following order:

         7200    IN      NS      newportal.open-bio.org.
         7200    IN      NS      dev.open-bio.org.
         7200    IN      NS      portal.open-bio.org.
         7200    IN      NS      pub.open-bio.org.

This means that over the next 24-72 hours as various DNS caches  
expire, biomoby.org will start to be serviced from the new pair of  
nameservers with the "old" pair acting as backup.

If this works smoothly I'll leave it alone for 1-week. After which I  
plan on editing the NetworkSolution records to remove the "old"  
servers from the list. That should complete the full transition from  
the old primary/secondary pair to the new pair.

Because of the overlap (both new and old server pairs are serving up  
the same info for biomoby.org) I don't expect anyone or any MOBY  
service user to experience any problems.

I just wanted to mention the DNS change in case a problem does occur.  
For the DNS savvy on this list, feel free to query the biomoby.org  
zone on the new machines to confirm that the info is being served  
correctly.

Your zone currently looks like this:

> $ORIGIN org.
> biomoby 7200    IN      SOA     portal.open-bio.org. root-l.open- 
> bio.org. (
>                 0705200503 114400 7200 950400 7200 )
>         7200    IN      NS      newportal.open-bio.org.
>         7200    IN      NS      dev.open-bio.org.
>         7200    IN      NS      portal.open-bio.org.
>         7200    IN      NS      pub.open-bio.org.
>         7200    IN      A       65.246.187.176
>         7200    IN      MX      10 biomoby.org.
> $ORIGIN biomoby.org.
> portal  7200    IN      A       65.246.187.176
> www     7200    IN      CNAME   biomoby.org.
> cvs     7200    IN      A       65.246.187.182
>         7200    IN      MX      10 biomoby.org.
> _lsid._tcp      IN      SRV     1 0 80 mobycentral.icapture.ubc.ca.



Regards,
Chris