CITES Networking is pleased to announce two upcoming changes to our authoritative DNS infrastructure: dns3.illinois.edu will replace dns1.iu.edu as our off-site authoritative nameserver (in case of an Urbana campus outage), and IPv6 addresses will be added to our authoritative nameservers dns1.illinois.edu and dns2.illinois.edu.
For most customers, no action is required. However, action will be required for IT Pros who maintain slaved delegation zones.
Here are the details:
On Thu 3/20, dns3.illinois.edu will begin slaving copies of all authoritative zones, but will not be advertised in our NS records yet, so clients will not use it.
On Wed 4/2, we will update IPAM and our registrars to start advertising dns3.illinois.edu and stop advertising dns1.iu.edu. At this point, both servers will be capable of answering queries.
Between Thu 4/3 and Mon 6/30, slaved delegation customers will need to update their in-zone NS records to add dns3.illinois.edu and remove dns1.iu.edu. We will contact these customers individually on or after 4/3 with additional details.
On Wed 4/9, dns1.illinois.edu will be assigned an IPv6 address, thus enabling queries using either IPv4 or IPv6. Note that zone transfers and notifies (for slaved delegations) will still occur over IPv4 only.
On Mon 4/14, dns2.illinois.edu will be assigned an IPv6 address.
Finally, on or after Tue 7/1, our authoritative zones will be removed from dns1.iu.edu. Note that by this time dns1.iu.edu will no longer be advertised in any of our NS records, so clients will have already stopped using it.
Q: Do these changes affect the campus DNS recursive resolver address (130.126.2.131)?
A: No, the recursive resolver address is not changing.
Q: Why is dns3.illinois.edu replacing dns1.iu.edu?
A: Every time we add or remove a zone, we have to email the Indiana DNS administrators and request that they also add or remove it from dns1.iu.edu. This creates extra manual work both for us and for Indiana, introduces both a delay and a slight risk of error into every change, and also makes troubleshooting more challenging on those infrequent occasions when problems do arise. dns3.illinois.edu will automatically get its zone configuration from IPAM (just like the Urbana campus DNS servers), but it is located in Chicago to provide geographic redundancy and independence from the Urbana campus network.
Q: How will my slaved delegation zones propagate to dns3.illinois.edu?
A: dns1.illinois.edu and dns2.illinois.edu will continue to slave zone copies from your master nameserver, and dns3.illinois.edu will slave zone copies from dns1.illinois.edu and dns2.illinois.edu (this requires no changes on your part). If you have master nameservers outside of the Urbana campus network, we can optionally arrange for dns3.illinois.edu to slave zone copies directly from you for added redundancy.
If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact hostmgr.
Thank you,
Illinois IPAM Team