Too often, companies and individuals overlook the importance of having a reliable DNS infrastructure. There is a campaign and website devoted to this subject at http://www.practicesafedns.org. They outline the ‘The Five Dimensions of DNS Diversity‘. Whilst it is not possible for everyone to practice all of these dimensions of diversity, it is a good idea to implement as many as you can.
The DNS records for the JC-J.IN and associated domains are distributed over four servers at physical locations that are geographically diverse (originally in London UK, Miami USA, San Jose USA and Kuala Lumpur Malaysia; click here for an update on the locations). If there is a disaster, e.g. power outage or network issue at one of these locations, the other three should be unaffected. Quoting from practicesafedns.org, ” The Internet does not exist in isolation from the physical world. An earthquake in California, a hurricane in Florida, a monsoon in Mumbai … any of these natural disasters could easily take out that area’s power, Internet and DNS resolution. This could result in an organization’s Web presence and entire electronic communications system being unreachable worldwide if it has not built geographical diversity into its DNS.”
The JC-J.IN DNS servers are all located in world class data centres using different ISP’s with different hardware. Again quoting from practicesafedns.org, “Hardware diversity not only mitigates the risk of falling victim to deliberate attacks against vulnerabilities in firmware, but also eliminates the potential single point of failure that comes with rolling out defective hardware.”
The data centres employed by JC-J.IN all have multiple connectivity points to each DNS node. As highlighted by practicesafedns.org, “Each DNS node should be linked by multiple backbones, with no overlap between providers at different nodes. This ensures that, whether an ISP was hit by massive latency or a clear blackout, the network would be able to continue to resolve DNS traffic normally.”
Here are live reports on the DNS of JC-J.IN:
From IntoDNS: http://www.intodns.com/jc-j.in
From Pingability: http://pingability.com/zoneinfo.jsp?domain=jc-j.in