How to Get DNS Names of a Web Server

For some special reason, I'm trying to make a web server able to get all the DNS names mapped to its IP. Let me explain more, I'm creating a website that will run in a web farm, every web server in the farm will have some subdomains mapped to its ip, what I want is that whenever my application starts on a web server is to be able to get all the subdomains mapped/assigned to that server, e.g. sub1.mydomain.com, sub2.mydomain.com. I understand that I have to use reverse dns lookup (i.e. give the IP get the domain name), but I also want to get all the subdomains not just the first one that maps to that IP. I've been reading about DNS on the internet but I don't seem to find any information on how to achieve what I want, normally you use dns to get the ip of a domain but I'm not sure that all servers enable reverse lookup. The problem is that I'm still not sure whether I'll host my own DNS server or use the services of some company (many companies offer DNS hosting services), so, my question is: - If I host my own DNS server, will it be possible to get all the subdomains using reverse lookup? Another question here, if I enable reverse lookup on my DNS server, can this have any negative side effects? As to security .. etc .. is there any way I can enable only my web servers to do reverse lookup while preventing anybody else on the internet from using reverse lookup? - If use the DNS hosting services of some company, will I be able to do what I want? ie. get the subdomains mapped to the IP address of a web server? Unfortunately I don't have much experience with working with web farms, so I would like also to ask whether every web server in the web farm gets its own static IP or how does it work? I mean you have the firewall ... etc .. so I don't know how IP assignments works in a web farm scenario .. Thanks a million in advance and sorry for my really long post .. Wal

Click to read more ...

DNS-Record TTL on worst case scenarios

i didnt find a nearly good solution for this problem yet: imagine, you're responsible for a small CDN network (static images), with two different datacenter. the balancing for the two DC is done with a anycast nameservice (a nameserver in every DC, user gets on nearest location). so, one of the scenario is that one of the datacenters goes down completly. you can do a monitoring on the nameserver and only route to the dc which is still alive, no problem. But what about the TTL from the DNS-Records? Tiny TTLs like 2 min. are often ignored by several ISP (e.g. AOL). so, the client doesn't get the IP from the other Datacenter. what could be a solution in this scenario?

Click to read more ...