response 1 of 25:

Jun 4 01:47 UTC 2001

I have no objections.  It sounds like the load on Grex would be barely 
noticible, it doesn't cost anything, and it sounds like HVCN is already 
supporting Grex somewhat, so Grex should return the favor.

response 3 of 25:

Jun 4 03:28 UTC 2001

My Humble Opinion is to go for it. :)  We like being nice people. :)

response 5 of 25:

Jun 4 12:46 UTC 2001

Me too.

response 7 of 25:

Jun 4 15:20 UTC 2001

Assuming janc, aruba, and remmers would have said something if there were
techical issues, I say go for it.  

response 9 of 25:

Jun 4 17:18 UTC 2001

Steve Weiss is one of our staff members who quietly puts in a lot of
hours keeping Grex running fit.  He also co-wrote Backtalk, so if he
suggests this won't be a drain on Grex resources, I'm not
worried.

response 11 of 25:

Jun 5 03:06 UTC 2001

Thanks for your support. The organization that I was urgently trying to 
find a solution for has set up a backup plan, so there is no rush, 
although I thought there was going to be when I first posted the 
request.

HVCN hosts websites for local non-profits, clubs, and other 
organizations, local governments, libraries, political candidates and 
advocacy groups. Most of these do not need nor want to spend the money 
it costs to register a domain, but more and more are wanting to do this, 
as the cost of registering comes down. It will be a big help to use Grex 
as a secondary DNS for these domains. There should not be many DNS 
requests and they are tiny little UDP packets that named can easily 
handle when they do come in. I can take care of the administration, 
which is also minimal, just adding a secondary line to the named.boot 
file and reloading.

response 13 of 25:

Jun 6 00:51 UTC 2001

Grex doesn't currently do DNS for its own domains, as far as the rest of the
world is concerned.  Grex is the master for the zone, but Jared's and my name
servers do the actual DNS serving.  This was set up to save load on Grex.

Grex was probably on slower hardware at that point, so that concern may not
still be valid.  Still, Grex really needs to rethink its own DNS situation
before offering secondary DNS services to anybody else.  My feeling on the
subject is that DNS is still something that should be done somewhere other
than Grex, since even if the load is negligable it doesn't make sense to put
load on the main Grex machine for something that has absolutely no reason to
be running on the same machine as Grex's user processes.

Sorry to be the lone voice of negativity here, but I figured that as the
person who did the current incarnation of Grex's DNS setup, and apparrently
the only person who remembers how it's set up, that I ought to say something.

response 15 of 25:

Jun 6 04:27 UTC 2001

Given what sometimes has happened here when staff members have felt their toes
were stepped on, I should point out that I have no particular attachment to
the current DNS architecture (which I think was done jointly by jared and me).
There are some things that the current DNS architecture does wrong.  Somebody
probably should do some thinking about how Grex's DNS should be set up.  I
would prefer that that somebody not be me.

There are a couple of points to keep in mind.  There's no such thing as
secondary DNS the way I'm under the impression srw envisioned it.  NS records
are round robined -- used alternately or pretty much at random.  The
primary/secondary distinction has to do which server pushes out the data to
the other servers, rather than with one of the servers being a backup for the
other.  This means that if one of the DNS severs, even the "secondary," goes
down, DNS for the domains involved will seem very slow.  A system like Grex,
which gets shut all the way down for long periods for backup or maintainance,
is rather ill suited for the job.  The other is that DNS servers need a fixed
IP address, which can only be changed with the help of a company that is at
this point very unresponsive about processing things.  It seems fairly likely
that in the next year Grex will either cease to exist, drop off the Net for
an extended period of time, or change IP addresses abruptly.  That makes not
only Grex but anything hosted on Grex's network rather unsuitable to be an
Internet facing DNS server.

response 17 of 25:

Jun 6 10:03 UTC 2001

Steve is talking about the fact that Covad may well disappear, taking our net
connection with it, and the fact that we have no plan for what to do in that
case.  I don't think there is any danger of ceasing to exist.  I really wish
we did have an active person handling the kind of network issues that Steve
used to handle.

response 19 of 25:

Jun 6 15:35 UTC 2001

"Cease to exist" presumes that all the people who are doing nothing about the
problem now would continue to do nothing if Grex dropped of the net.  I
promise, that is not a possibility.

response 21 of 25:

Jun 7 20:11 UTC 2001

(more to the point, the comment presumed that if Grex were to go away for
several months, its users would probably have found something else to do with
their time by the time it came back up)

response 23 of 25:

Oct 11 13:17 UTC 2001

it would take quite a lot for grex to successfully fail ;-)  the
backbone of support for computer conferencing and virtual 
communities like grex is quite strong from what i can see surveying
systems like grex, well, the river and many others.

addressing the dns question, i'll throw in my support for the
request as well.