Hello –

I have my DNS with a cloud provider that I want to stop using, and was considering where to move it (a few domains with a handful entries each). At some point I was wondering if I should run it myself. I have two VPS’ in different data centers with fixed IP addresses, and I read up a bit - seems like this is doable. I am not set on what software to use. I would like it to run in a container. Does anybody have any recommendations, positive or negative?

Thanks :)

  • wikiEnglish
    5·
    1 year ago

    I think it’s pretty doable, but there are some things you should think about:

    • Email delivery dependencies: If you use email addresses on the domains you’re hosting, problems in DNS will cause you to not be able to receive emails. This can be a problem if you plan on monitoring your DNS with alerts via email, or if you need to do password recovery via email to access your VPS accounts, for example. Check if this applies to other services you might be running.
    • You’ll need to understand glue records to setup at least one of your domains.

    For my domains, I’m running nsd in two different VPSes, and the way that I edit my zones is that I have a script that converts a shorthand format (that I came up with) to a standard zone file and then rsyncs (using hostnames declared in my .ssh/config files) the zone files and nsd configuration files to both servers. The script then reloads nsd.

    I chose nsd because it felt like the simpler option, no troubles so far. I use them directly on my debian hosts, no containers.

    I have no monitoring, but I should. My terrible excuse is that the infrastructure I’m running is not critical and it’s on the same hosts as my nameservers, so they usually go down together. I wouldn’t put client domain names in there without monitoring.