March 22, 2003
As DNS turns

It's funny to watch traffic slowly trickle down on one server and pick up on another.. but the sad part is that my ttl is set to 3600s.. and I made the DNS change about 12 hours ago.

Still seeing considerable amount of traffic on the old server.. that means there are quite a few servers out there that don't respect ttl settings.. that really stinks.

Posted March 22, 2003 12:58 PM in Geek Stuff
TrackBack URL for this entry: http://www.unix-girl.com/mt/mt-tb.cgi/650
Comments
On March 22, 2003 01:29 PM Eby added:

Another problem is OS/browser cache. I changed my DNS entry the other day and even after flushing my windows DNS, Mozilla was still going to the old server. IE and Opera were going to the new one but no matter what, Mozilla wouldn't do it until I restarted it completely (turned off Quick Launch). I cleared its cache, history and everything I could think of, but no success until the restart. I'm not quite sure what caused the problem.

#
On March 22, 2003 02:27 PM Derek added:

One thing you could do is:

- make "new-server.unix-girl.com" a CNAME for www
- Add a ServerAlias new-server.unix-girl.com to the VirtualHost definition
- On the OLD server, 302 any URL to http://new-server.unix-girl.com/$URI_PATH using ModRewrite

Then, after a few weeks, 302 any request for "new-server" to www, and then a few weeks later, blow away the new-server definition entirely.

Since "new-server" never existed, it won't be cached, it'll be picked up fresh, and all the traffic going for the OLD server will immediately be shunted to it's exact equivalent on the new server. :)

The only thing I'm not sure of is how it handles POST requests (e.g., people leaving comments), but at least you wouldn't have to worry about people still seeing the old site.

#
Trackbacks