Can't get to Assembla spaces and tools? It's a DNS propagation delay

Posted by Andy Singleton on Wed, Jun 06, 2007

Since our hardware failure two weeks ago, we have been working to eliminate downtime moving to a new datacenter with faster response, adding RAID to all storage, and configuring hot swap machines. We made that move last night.

The system was down for about 2 hours (from 1:00 am to 3:00 am US eastern time. That's a small price to pay for a big increase in future reliability.

HOWEVER, most people experienced much longer periods of downtime because of DNS propagation delays. Last week, we set the TTL on our DNS entries to 60 seconds, so that we could change the destination addresses for www.assembla.com and tools.assembla.com without any delays. Unfortunately, many DNS servers ignore these instructions, and were sending users to the old IP addresses (and servers that we shut down) for many hours or even a full day.

Tags: assembla

COMMENTS

Nice job guys!

I use OpenDNS, they're pretty good with propogation times, and they have a web interface where domain owners can force a refresh of their DNS entry even if the propogation time hasn't expired.

However, I don't think any DNS server obeys a 60 second TTL, that's a hell of a lot of load! Probably an hour minimum.

Of course, just my luck, to commit to the old servers and then to corrupt my local copy and find my data destroyed :D

But, like you said, small price to pay.

posted @ Thursday, June 07, 2007 4:43 PM by Computer Guru

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