DNS and Time Infrastructure Overhaul
As our network grows even the most optimized of services need to scale. While its unlikely that you may have noticed an issue with DNS services, we have decided to both increase its capacity and reduce the scope of that service. We have also added the ability for you to sync with reliable internal time servers. Both modifications are nearing completion but you can take advantage of them right now as they prepare us for future growth.
DNS Modifications
Going forward our DNS servers will only answer authorative requests for the external network (ie, Internet) and full answers including caching will be provided to internal servers (ie, hosted networks, ExchangeDefender, colocation customers, infrastructure partners). More specifically, we will not provide “recursive lookups” for external users and will only answer authorative requests from the Internet.
Background: DNS servers resolve friendly hostnames such as www.ownwebnow.com into IP addresses such as 65.99.192.50. The DNS server, in our case ns1.ownwebnow.com is said to be authorative for a zone (in our case ownwebnow.com) if it is the official provider of the information that matches the hostname to the IP address. When you use a DNS registry such as Network Solutions to register your domain, you enter a set of name servers (ns1.ownwebnow.com and ns2.ownwebnow.com) which will provide resolution, or be authorative, for that domain. Clients, including remote networks, computers, servers and more use their own DNS servers to resolve hostnames into IP addresses so computers can locate one another over the Internet. When a remote server requests a lookup from their local server the local server checks if its authorative for the domain (ownwebnow.com) and if it is not authorative it starts the recursion process – it first looks at its root hints to find the top level domain (.com) and eventually receives an answer from the authorative server (ns1.ownwebnow.com) which it sends back to the client. By disabling recursion on our name servers we stand to reduce the load and increase performance on our network because we will only be providing the DNS service to our customers, not everyone on the Internet.
Time Server Modifications
As of late there have been many issues with the public pool of NTP servers that help computers and networks around the world syncronize their clocks. To make matters worse, there are many issues with virtual machines and the horrible drift (difference between real time and time in the virtual machine) in time thats introduced with new technologies.
If you are Internal to the Own Web Now network you can use time.ownwebnow.com as your time server. It should (and so far statistically it has) answer the time syncronization requests 100% of the time. Our previous time.ownwebnow.com was a round-robbin implementation that simply aliased time.ownwebnow.com to the various military and research organizations that had public time servers. Over time, that infrastructure has become less and less reliable so we’re providing the time sync for you if you’re on our network. Just use time.ownwebnow.com and you’re all set.
That is all for now, we expect all time and DNS related work to be complete by July 15th but you are welcome to use them now to improve your performance. This will be a very seamless and transparent implementation for our entire user base but we wanted you to be aware of what we’re doing to keep up. As always, thank you for your business.