Nameservers question

[keith.sieman]

I have a question about this whole nameserver-redundancy thing for those of you that are experienced in web server administration and/or nameservers and nameserver administration.

Is there anything wrong with setting a slave server as the primary? Like, say I made ns1.mydns.tld the slave DNS Server, ns2.mydns.tld another DNS Slave server, and ns3.mydns.tld the master server
because the master server would be the same one that my web hosting, MySQL/MariaDB server and what-not is on, seeing as that's the server that I run Sentora on.

Also, would 512MB of RAM, and a 1-Core 3.2GHz Processor be enough for a dedicated Bind server on a CentOS 5, 6, or 7 Distro?

[gerald_clark]

Why do you want to run a name server?

[keith.sieman]

To learn about how to do it and for curiosity. It's not exactly going to be a production server, just more of a toy for use on my own websites and other private-usages. I can get 2x of those servers for around $40-$50 every 6 months, which isn't bad at all. My plan is to get one in Montreal, QC (for ns2) and one in Los Angelos, CA (for ns1) - the webserver itself which would serve as ns3 is in New York City, NY.

[gerald_clark]

You should use your domain registrar's name servers.

[keith.sieman]

I do.... for my production (as in business) websites. The whole point of this is to learn.

[TrevorH]

The idea is that you put your nameservers on different machines, in different data centres, on different IP subnets so that no one failure of any of these will take out both and thus ensure that your dns names continue to be resolved.

[keith.sieman]

Right, but does it matter which one is which as far as ns1, ns2 and ns3 goes? I'd assume that it doesn't, but it wouldn't surprise me to be wrong about that.

Though, I may change my mind from Montreal, QC for ns2 and put it over in the UK.

[markkuk]

There's no requirement to call your name servers "ns1", "ns2", etc. You can use any valid DNS name. It doesn't matter which of your name servers is the master, and it's entirely possible to keep your master server hidden from public view and use only slave servers as your publically accessible DNS servers.

[aks]

The main constraints about which DNS server to query are:
1) Is it authoritative for the requested domain - if not it may be slightly out of date.
2) The round trip time. The longer to resolve the name to IP the longer the conversation will take.