NETTICA FAILSAFE SERVICES
protecting your investment
OVERVIEW
Nettica FailSafe gives you the tools you need to monitor and manage your
servers. The last hurricaine season left little doubt
the importantance of server monitoring and DNS failover services.
Our services are the perfect compliment to our Bulk DNS Services, using the
same template system to manage your failover services.
PLANNING
While it's not necessary to plan every aspect of your configuration up front,
our FailSafe service is typically used to monitor server health, not the health
of an individual domain. You will want to make two groups for each
server, one for the normal configuration of the domains on that server,
and one for the failover state of the server. In our example, we will use
the names of the cities as the names of the groups. BOCA is our primary site;
ATLANTA is the backup.
PRIMARY DNS TEMPLATE
BOCA
|
HOST NAME
|
RECORD
|
TTL
|
DATA
|
EDIT
|
DELETE
|
| {domain}
|
A |
Default |
1.2.3.4
|
 |
 |
| {domain}
|
MX |
12 Hours |
10 mail.{domain}
|
|
|
| {domain} |
MX |
12 Hours |
20 mail1.mailhostingservice.com
|
|
|
| mail.{domain}
|
A |
12 Hours |
1.2.3.4 |
|
|
| www.{domain}
|
CNAME |
Default |
{domain}
|
|
|
|
| New A |
New MX |
New CNAME |
New Forward |
New TXT |
New SRV |
SOA & NS |
New NS |
Apply Template |
|
|
PRIMARY DNS TEMPLATE
ATLANTA
|
HOST NAME
|
RECORD
|
TTL
|
DATA
|
EDIT
|
DELETE
|
| {domain}
|
A |
Default |
2.2.3.4
|
|
|
| {domain}
|
MX |
12 Hours |
10 mail.{domain}
|
|
|
| {domain}
|
MX |
12 Hours |
20 mail1.mailhostingservice.com
|
|
|
| mail.{domain}
|
A |
12 Hours |
1.2.3.4
|
|
|
| www.{domain}
|
CNAME |
Default |
{domain}
|
|
|
|
| New A |
New MX |
New CNAME |
New Forward |
New TXT |
New SRV |
SOA & NS |
New NS |
Apply Template |
|
|
Note that the only difference between the two groups is the IP address of the
root domain. Even though the mail server is also running at this IP
address, because they have Nettica's Backup Mail Service for their customers,
they do not need to failover that record. Our FailoSafe service is not a
mere search and replace for the IP address. You can specify much more
powerful interactions than your typical failover service.
PURCHASING SERVICE
Nettica FailSafe requires Nettica Bulk DNS Service. As you can see above,
it is to allow you to setup your failsafe groups. Current Bulk customers
have their service pro-rated to their current expiration date, so you can
easily add service for minimal cost. When you purchase Nettica FailSafe,
you'll immeidately notice a new control panel added to your account summary:
FAILSAFE SERVICE
|
TOTAL RULES
|
REMAINING RULES
|
CHECK INTERVAL
|
CREATED
|
EXPIRES
|
PRICE
|
| 5 |
5 |
15 Minutes |
1/1/2006 |
1/1/2010 |
$100.00 |
|
MANAGE FAILSAFE RULES...
|
GET MORE RULES...
|
|
|
To setup your service, click on
MANAGE RULES...
Then, on the FailSafe Summary, click on
ADD RULE
to setup your initial service.
ADDING RULES
In the example above the customer is creating a rule that checks the overall
state of their server using an HTTP GET request over port 80. If the
server is not entirely down, but say, the database has failed, it automatically
fails over to the backup server. The customer wrote the script at the
given URL to report the proper status. If the entire machine is
unreachable, this will also trigger the FailSafe service to failover to the
backup location.
ROUND-ROBIN
To configure Nettica FailSafe for round-robin there are two things to keep in
mind. With round-robin failover you must have one rule setup for each IP
address in the round-robin. In addition, you only configure a single
group containing the IP addresses of the round-robin servers. Finally,
note that with round-robin failover only the round-robin entries will be
affected by the failover. In other words, you cannot completely rewrite
your DNS with round-robin failover like you can with our regular failover.
A round-robin template looks like this:
PRIMARY DNS TEMPLATE
ROUND-ROBIN
|
HOST NAME
|
RECORD
|
TTL
|
DATA
|
EDIT
|
DELETE
|
| +www.{domain}
|
A |
5 Minutes |
1.2.3.4
|
|
|
| +www.{domain}
|
A |
5 Minutes |
2.2.3.4
|
|
|
| +www.{domain} |
A |
5 Minutes |
3.2.3.4
|
|
|
|
| New A |
New MX |
New CNAME |
New Forward |
New TXT |
New SRV |
SOA & NS |
New NS |
Apply Template |
|
|
Note that the plus sign ("+") indicates the entry is part of a round-robin
collection and must be present on all entries in the round-robin list.
Nettica FailSafe for Round-robin is appropriate for customers with geo-located
servers running in round-robin, and for customers with multiple service
providers serving the same location. If you have want to
load-balance/round-robin multiple servers in the same location with a single
network connection we recommend using a hardware solution (eg, a load-balancer)
over our solution. Our solution works for the scenario, but we do not
recommend our solutions when more appropriate alternatives are avaialble.
TESTING
There are many ways to test FailSafe before putting it into service. You
can setup two empty groups, add the domains into the normal group, and then
setup a rule that is sure to fail. This will cause the groups to change
without affecting current service. You can also some dummy records to
verify changes in the DNS. Since you have our Bulk DNS Service, you can
create some non-registered, test domains and use DNS Lookup tools such as DIG
and NSLOOKUP against our nameservers to verify the proper behavior. Be
sure to test the email notifications, that's clearly the most important feature
of the service. Please feel free to contact support if you have any
special circumstances that may be difficult to test.
MONITORING SERVICE
Nettica FailSafe includes real-time charts and statistics. Even if you do
not use Failover, the monitoring alone is worth the cost of the service.
Are you getting the reliability your ISP claims in their SLA? When is the
service down, and for how long? With our real-time and historical
charting you will know how reliable your service is, and whether or not any
changes are needed.
CONCLUSION
Nettica FailSafe is the right set of solutions for maximizing your service
uptime. With geo-located servers and comprehensive management tools,
Nettica FailSafe ensures your sites are always available.
Copyright � 2006-2010 Nettica Corporation All rights reserved.