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I have a client that has two domains: company.com (their internal network) and company-prod.com (their production network).

Some of their web services were having connectivity issues on their production domain. They access their via the address www.company.com (although it is in the company-prod.com domain) and it was failing to find the service because the DNS records were unavailable for that domain.

To solve this I see two possible solutions: 1) create zone on company-prod.com for "company.com" and setup host records for hosts that are needed (ie. www) or 2) configure forwarders on company-prod.com to point to the NS for company.com

The problem I see with option 2 is if company.com is unavailable then company-prod.com would be unable to resolve names for that domain. However, I believe the names should be cached, correct? So that would only occur when a cache has expired and the company.com NS are unavailable. Any suggestions or advice on these options? Maybe there is a better way to do this? I don't spend a lot of time in DNS so, please excuse.

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2 Answers

up vote 3 down vote

Why would company.com be unavailable? If due to some type of service/infrastructure outage then being able to resolve DNS for that domain really doesn't do any good... if the resources that DNS would resolve to can't be reached.

My suggestion would be to use option 2. It's going to be more reliable (in terms of getting proper DNS resolution) and is going to be less wotk on your part.

If you go with option 1 then you've essentially got a stale, static copy of the DNS zone and it's corresponding records, which will need to be manually created and updated.

I say defer to the authorative name servers for the domain in question.

Another option would be to use DNS stub zones.

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Company.com has different maintenance windows than company-prod.com so that would be one excuse why it would be unavailable. Also, they are separate sites so Internet connectivity at company.com is not redundant like company-prod.com so any Internet outage would be more common to happen at company.com. – David George Sep 28 '11 at 14:53
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Which means that having working DNS resolution is pointless if resources aren't available due to maintenence or a borked internet connection. – joeqwerty Sep 28 '11 at 14:54
As I stated in my question the resource (ie. "www.company.com") is actually in the company-prod.com site. – David George Sep 28 '11 at 14:58
I'm a little confused. You want stable DNS name resolution, even if the resources that DNS is resolving to aren't available? That seems counterintuitive. I'm probably misunderstanding the problem and your question. Can you tell me what the difference between the "internal" network and the "production" network is? Generally a production network is understood to be the internal resource network, so I'm confused by your delineation of them. – joeqwerty Sep 28 '11 at 15:09
No. The resource would still be avilable. Server X is in PROD, but it's "DNS" is actually using the Company.com TLD. Production is the Internet facing SaaS network. Internal is the in-house company netowrk. – David George Sep 28 '11 at 15:19
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DNS records for task

$ origin company-prod.com
site IN A x.x.x.x

$ origin company.com
site IN CNAME site.company-prod.com.
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This is not a NAMED server – David George Oct 12 '11 at 13:32
origin become obsolete, IN maybe too, but not idea of CNAMEing over domains – Lazy Badger Oct 12 '11 at 13:45
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