* * * * *

                   Intellectualizing things into the ground

Thinking that things were going to calm down now that Smirk was headed off to
Charlotte for a major server installation, I figured I might go through our
DNS (Domain Name Service) records and insure they're consistent. Mainly
because the major server installation is going into a second facility up in
Charlotte, so we're expanding quite a bit.

Unfortunately, the DNS records are a bit of a mess, what with old records
that have accumulated, making it difficult to figure out what's used and what
isn't. There's also the problem that we have three types of servers—the
physical servers, virtual servers (a complete operating system installation
on a simulated machine) and what I'll call pseudo-servers, which are
basically glorified websites with their own IP address. It's not always clear
what is what (yes, our internal records could be a bit better, but it's an
issue we're aware of [1]).

I'm stumbling over the fact that I want to organize the DNS records, but I'm
not sure how I want to organize them. Right now, the records are pretty much
flat—that is, we have alpha.example.net, bravo.example.net and
charlie.example.net, but alpha and bravo are here in Boca, while charlie is
in Charlotte (and delta.example.net will be in the second Charlotte
location). It's one way of doing things, and it's not bad, since for the most
part, we don't care where the servers are physically located. But then we
need to filter traffic for bravo and that's a virtual server and you can't
really filter the traffic on the virtual server, you need to filter it on the
actual server it's running on. I don't remember if that's alpha or romeo. (Or
does romeo even have virtual servers? Am I mixing it up with juliet?) And is
this level of information even something I want to have in DNS?

And then there're the routers. Since I started at The Company [2] our network
has expanded quite a bit (enough to make OSPF (Open Shortest Path First)
worth while) and dealing with traceroute becomes an issue. About a year ago,
I set up DNS records for the various routers with the names encoding the
interface being used. But in the past year, not only have certain routes
changed (say, the other end of se0-0.router.customer was moved from
se2.edge1.bct.rt to se0-1.edge2.bct.rt (where rt is “router” and bct is the
airport code for Boca Raton)) but the interfaces have changed as well (for
example, going from a single T1 serial connection to a multipoint link
binding multiple T1s). So is the interface type important to know? Or just
the router? (I'm thinking—just the router). Also, note the name I gave our
edge router—edge1.bct.rt. Conceivably, this means I can create a DNS zone rt,
which contains all our routers. But by the same token, I'm inclined to create
a DNS zone bct, which contains the routers located in Boca Raton.

Basically, is name.bct.rt better or worse than name.rt.bct?

I don't know. But I do know that we have stuff other than routers that's
somewhat datacenter centric, like managed switches we have in Boca, as well
as Charlotte (airport code of ctl).

Ah … I'm thinking too hard on this. Time for some Dicewars [3] …

(oh, and it turns out Smirk didn't leave for Charlotte today after all—too
much stuff came up at the last minute and pushed his trip back a few days)

[1] gopher://gopher.conman.org/0Phlog:2007/03/12.3
[2] gopher://gopher.conman.org/0Phlog:2004/11/10.1
[3] gopher://gopher.conman.org/0Phlog:2006/08/14.1

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