<snip> > I'm coming in late to this thread. We too are a hosting provider > (small time), hosting approximately 1600 live domains. > > Not to say tinydns is a bad alternative, as it has it's strengths, but > we moved away from [outgrew] it 2 years ago. > > If you were already running Bind, CentOS 5 is a great platform. I run > a few multi-domain (3-10) slaves using a chrooted Bind for a couple > offsite clients. Fine for small number of domains. Short term, I'd > recommend just getting another Bind install up and running to fix your > issue, THEN look at alternatives. > > I've personally used PowerDNS, TinyDNS, MyDNS, nsd, Bind 8/9, and MS > DNS. PowerDNS is phenomenal. Look into the proprietary > "supermaster/superslave" functionality. To manage the 1600+ domains, > we have our primary server setup using a MySQL backend. This allows > simple integration of our accounting and support systems. The slaves > are using sqlite3 backends. One word of caution, while a "superslave" > may automatically add a new domain, it will not remove domains deleted > at the master. I've solved this by removing all non NS/SOA records > from that domain and updating the serial on the master - so changes > propagate to slaves. Then have a cronjob running that purges empty > domains from the databases on the master and slaves. > > Also, I've found the PowerDNS RPM's located at the EPEL repo to be > completely stable. They even have the backends broken out separately. > > Lastly, I don't know about you, but I hate giving shell access where > it's not needed ... especially to support staff under a Tier3 level. > So I use Pure-FTPD running virtual users and an FTPS (not SFTP) > client like lftp or filezilla for transfers. If I need a higher level > of security then I use rsync over SSH. > > Forgive me for being so verbose. :-) > > -ken Overly Verbose? Not at all, Ken. I am thrilled to hear of your experiences and was, actually, intending to do a straight BIND install first as it's what I'm most familiar with at this time. I certainly have a lot of material to review before making the leap away from BIND proper, but that I now know what that material is, at least in part, is a blessing. Please be verbose as you'd like. I, for one, truly appreciate it. Thanks again, ~Ray