DNS update confirmations

2019-06-27 - News - Tony Finch

You might have noticed that the IP Register ops pages on Jackdaw now have a note in the title stating when the last DNS update completed. (Updates start at 53 minutes past each hour and usually take a couple of minutes.)

Occasionlly the update process breaks. It is written fairly conservatively so that if anything unexpected happens it stops and waits for someone to take a look. Some parts of the build process are slightly unreliable, typically parts that push data to other systems. Many of these push actions are not absolutely required to work, and it is OK to retry when the build job runs again in an hour.

Over time we have made the DNS build process less likely to fail-stop, as we have refined the distinction between actions that must work and actions that can be retried in an hour. But the build process changes, and sometimes the new parts fail-stop when they don't need to. That happened earlier this week, which prompted us to add the last update time stamp, so you a little more visibility into how the system is working (or not).